Let It Not Make Sense

Sit With The Unknowing. The Truth Will Emerge In Time.

A buddha statue from a museum in Hanoi.

I have a sleep disorder that sounds like a sex problem: Confusion Arousal Disorder. It is a real drag. The disorder causes my brain, when I enter into the deepest stage of sleep, to suddenly snap awake. My brain cannot actually go straight into awake mode, so I arouse from sleep in a state of being simultaneously asleep and awake.

Reality becomes a storm in my mind. Shapes in the room, like, for example, a jacket hanging over a chair, become the leering face of a terrorist about to flip a switch and detonate a bomb. Or a book on a desk becomes an object I was supposed to do something with but can’t remember what.

The world around me becomes a swirl of unprocessed data, and my mind careers into cul-de-sacs of meaning, trying to spin everything into a story that makes sense. The effect is maddening. My poor wife has to hear me say nonsense like, “Noriko, I quit! I can’t fix the building anymore!”

My reality spins in a crisis of meaning. Absurd narratives emerge from formless chaos. After a few moments of this, I finally awaken fully to feel utter humiliation. I don’t know why, but that’s always the final reaction. Then I go back to sleep, often for it to happen again and again throughout the night. More than once, I’ve wondered if this fungible reality that morphs and swirls in and out of my mind will actually break my poor brain and plunge me into permanent madness. So far, no. I always emerge from it sane and sound.

I’m sharing this, because the effect of the past couple of weeks in the wake of the election has been eerily similar. I’ve been on a three-week trip to Japan and Vietnam with my peach of a wife, Noriko. The trip was to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We’ve eaten well, seen friends from our time living in Japan, held hands over dinner, and bickered in airports.

We were on a four-hour bullet train from Kyoto to Fukuoka when the results of the election poured in. The time is upside down here, so when it was night in the U.S., it was daytime here. Ricefields and small towns blurred past the window while I refreshed the news on my phone, over and over and over until I awoke to a new reality, one I truly did not foresee and experienced as a feeling of utter devastation.

In the days that followed, I’ve read countless takes. Condemnation and speculation, theory upon theory. The voices of the commentariat have an uncanny similarity to the madness in my mind when I awaken in the dark of night and nothing makes sense. Trying one narrative on for size after another. Point, counterpoint, guess after guess. In truth, it all feels like delusion, like the stories my mind conjures from the spun sugar of my nighttime madness.

Here is what I think. Something enormous is happening. A giant shift is taking place. It is chaotic and terrifying. It is unknowable as of yet. Even those who got what they wanted don’t really know what is happening or what will happen. That may always be the case, but this time the murkiness is more pronounced. To be hurtling into the future at the rate of one second per second is always terrifying, but usually we have the illusion of knowing where we are headed. This time we have no such comfort.

To not know something as important as what is happening and what is coming is incredibly uncomfortable. But treating this fear with endless shouting is not a balm, it only exacerbates the condition, at least for me. The back and forth is our entire culture thinking out loud. We are all brainstorming, in real time, what shape our reality might take. But we simply cannot know at this time.

The internet has made it all of our jobs to know. Our minds feel most useful when they recognize patterns and spin up stories. But none of that is helping right now. We are in a period of cultural Confusion Arousal Disorder.

What helps is not to make up more stories, but instead to stop: To sit in the scary unknown, to feel the liberation of a faulty world-view being ripped away and to trust that when we see what we must do we will have the courage to do it. But right now, I believe the moment calls for quiet. At least for me.

I am not being prescriptive. I am being descriptive. This is what I believe I need to do. You may feel the same. You may not. But this place will be a place where I write about other than what is on everyone’s mind until the shape of my reality begins to make sense again. I hope it helps.