Confirm humanity

Or how to know you are sentient

I struggle with noise, unless it’s my song of the moment, in which case I must play it loud and repetitively until some poor fortunate (yes, I meant that) begs for respite.

Even in silence, everything is too noisy and only occasionally do I realise that this noise is the spaghetti junction inside my head. Those moments are just a tiny crack in the matrix but they are enough to keep me endlessly searching for, as Wayne Dyer put it, a spiritual solution to every problem.

I panic when a captcha asks me to confirm humanity and before I do it (always a gamble) I wonder if I am going to be able to do it. When asked to tick the squares that have, say, motorcycles in them, I wonder does it mean the little finger that is on the hand of the person driving the motorcycle, or does it mean the person’s scarf that is billowing in the wind behind the motorcycle? Aren’t they as one in that moment, motorcycle and driver? With such an attitude, more often than not I fail the captchas, committing myself to an endless cycle of multi-square hell, where I tick at random in the hope that such an inability to follow instruction will be recognised as a confirmation of humanity in itself.

Of late, I’ve given up everything because I’ve understood that I’ve been asleep again. This may be temporary but it feels good. If I continually strip away things from the outside - alcohol, sugar, shopping, scrolling - then I might have a chance of understanding what is going on inside.

I think - hang on - it’s all a distraction. All of it. For me, information is the worst distraction of all. I can’t have a passing interest: I must have, get, do, be all of the information before I realise that I have strayed once again.

Strayed from what?

My humanity. The thing that is not all of the things I’m over-dosing on to run from it. The thing that is my leaping heart when I catch the eye of someone I truly love. The thing that awakens when I tune into the birds singing in the morning instead of a podcast. The thing that dances irrepressibly in the twinkling eyes of my 91-year-old auntie, such acute aliveness that one can only see in the very young and very old. The thing that sobs and yells and laughs, sometimes all within the space of half an hour.

The thing that we cannot buy, acquire, book, drink, steal, copy or even become.

The thing that we are.