Yesterday, I believed that I almost lost my pointer-finger fingertip to a heavy, slamming solid metal door. I immediately thought I had broken the bone at the end of my finger. This seems to contradict my constant assertion that I have an unhealthily high threshold of pain, but it does not. Rather, after seriously hurting myself so may times during the course of growing up and thinking that nothing had happened (when in reality I usually had earned large gashes on parts of my scalp that I could not see or dislodged my entire nose), I have made the transition to thinking that I need to go to the hospital every time any of my nerves gets a little action. Basically, I don't trust my nervous system. I look upon it two ways: 1) My nervous system is heroic, buffering pain so that I can triumphantly go about my day without making a big deal out of life-threatening injuries, or 2) My nervous system is lazy and weak, forcing me to interpret vague signals that might or might not be considered pain by other healthy humans.

Today, after much deliberation, I believe that I received above average pain from catching my finger in the door, but my fingertip was neither broken nor was it almost removed. A healthy nervous system is supposed to relay pain information to the brain at roughly the speed of light. Upon receiving this info, the brain reacts instantaneously. You jump, you howl, you pass out. But, even with some slight delays due to screaming or thrashing about, you have some idea of how badly you have just been injured after a maximum of ten seconds. I caught my finger in the metal door 32 hours ago, and it wasn’t until just recently that I finally decided how badly I was hurt.

Many things in my life are like this. Things that should be instinctual sit in my head for days before I can react appropriately, if at all. I do have instincts. It is just that my instincts are so dissimilar to most everyone I know or have had the occasion to observe or have read about or have seen on video that I am unable to interpret them quickly. The majority of what I think, feel, and sense seems to be a foreign/ancient/alien language (that must be painstakingly translated after it is painstakingly discovered and painstakingly researched) to the untrained ear that is my mind, which resides in the head of a boy that just wants to be like everyone else.