When my brain makes me believe anything is possible

When my brain makes me believe anything is possible

Most of the time, I’m unable to picture myself in the future.

I haven’t worked in over two years. I don’t really have a social circle, no routine that makes me feel like I’m moving forward. My days are often dull. Inside, I feel “meh.” Sometimes, I downright feel dead.

So I go to bed. Not because I necessarily feel like sleeping, but because sleeping puts that suffering on pause.

And then, at some point, an idea comes along.

I see a problem. I tell myself I could create something, find a solution, produce a report, or simply understand how something works.

And then I’m off.

I research. I analyze. I build. I can spend hours on it. I feel useful. I finally have something that drives me, something that gets me out of bed.

I can run at full speed. Forget to eat, shower, sleep. In the moment, I don’t even necessarily feel tired. I’m on a roll.

I love creating. I love learning. I love looking for clues, making connections, and seeing a result take shape. Those moments make me feel good. They give me access to an energy I can’t seem to find any other way.

But my brain doesn’t always stop at the pleasure of creating.

It starts imagining what comes next. And it gets carried away.

I create InspeKT. I produce reports. I send them to municipalities, MRCs, the Ministry of Transportation. I tell myself it could be useful.

Up to that point, it’s fine.

But in my head, it doesn’t just stay “ it could be useful .” It becomes: someone is going to see my work. Someone is going to understand what I can bring to the table. Someone might offer me a contract.

Then, at the very least, I almost get the impression that they’re going to call me to offer me a position.

In the moment, everything seems possible. Everything seems logical. The pieces fit together in my head, and I start seeing myself in a role that, in reality, was never offered to me.

No one called me. No one offered me a contract. I received no positive response to my outreach or to the reports I sent.

There were changes on the ground after some reports. Maybe my efforts contributed to them. Maybe they were already planned. I have no idea, because I get no follow-up. Just silence.

Then the momentum, this “fantasizing,” fades.

And I’m faced with reality: I’m a guy who hasn’t worked in over two years, who has just spent hours, days, sometimes more, working on a project while imagining that it might finally lead somewhere.

That’s when I ask myself: what have I been telling myself again?

I look at what I created, but I also look at everything I had started imagining around it. And it hurts to realize how close that next step seemed, when it existed only in my head.

I feel ridiculous. I feel exhausting. I wonder why my brain so easily turns a possibility into a story that feels almost certain to me.

And what makes it all more complicated is that I don’t necessarily want these bursts to disappear.

Because without them, what do I do?

They make me want to get up. They allow me to create, think, and feel alive. Without a project that drives me, I can spend my days sleeping and wondering what the point of all this is.

So yes, these bursts help me. And yes, they also make me suffer.

Is it a way for my brain to defend itself against my chronic depression?

Does it cling to these projects to keep me active, to give me a reason to get out of bed?

Is it a way of reminding me that I still have potential, that I’m still capable of creating and accomplishing things?

Or is it simply a crappy but realistic way of making me realize that my brain doesn’t work the way it used to?

I ask myself these questions, and I don’t have the answers.

I’d like to keep the pleasure of creating. Keep that curiosity that pushes me to search and understand. But I’d like my brain to stop turning every project into a pseudo-success.

I’d like to be able to do something because it interests me, without finding myself believing that it’s necessarily going to change my life.

Because maybe that’s the strangest thing: most of the time, I’m unable to picture myself in the future. But when an idea carries me away, I can picture myself there so intensely that, for a while, that future feels like it’s almost already here.

And when I realize it isn’t, the fall is hard... really rough!