{"id":5267,"date":"2026-11-11T22:32:48","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T22:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=5267"},"modified":"2026-11-11T22:59:45","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T22:59:45","slug":"hyper-aware-and-story-focused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/hyper-aware-and-story-focused\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyper-aware, and story-focused"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hyper-aware, self-focused, or story-focused. I don’t know but I think I must have spent my first forty years of life in one of those kinds of mental states.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can remember being a young boy, maybe 10 or 11, and wondering why I existed as a human being. I saw myself looking out from behind my eyes, as if i were a puppet wearing a human suit, walking through a reality I didn’t want or enjoy. I was hyper-aware of the play, of the performances around me.<\/p>\n

I grew up through that surrounded by people close to me whose behaviours often felt confusing or mysterious. From as far back as I can remember, until I was about twenty, my immediate family and home life always contained so much drama and trauma that being alive itself seemed unreal or surreal.<\/p>\n

My favourite times were often when I could get time by myself to escape into a fantasy or a comic book, where I’d find or create some safe mental harbour to anchor down. Cocooning meant safety.<\/p>\n

Do we think that reality was created from speaking a single word? Storytellers create whole worlds out of them. The dominant voice around me growing up was often my dad’s. I relied on him for my food, my money, my sense of belonging, and whatever family history he could tell me about. He set the tone for how our house ran, he woke me up each morning, and said goodnight every night. He made our meals, paid our rent, and drove us around. He kind of did everything a parent could do for the essential, material aspects of my life. He was in many ways the centre of it.<\/p>\n

It took a dozen and a half years to come out from behind my own eyes, out of my cocoon, and appreciate that I was playing my part well, and starting to write and recite my own script. I started to hear my own words speaking to me, not just his.<\/p>\n

I grew up both loving him and fearing my Dad, wanting to learn from him, but also feeling desperate to understand his thinking and what motivated him as a person. We seemed to be very different people at heart, with different ways of looking at the world. He could be wise and fair-minded when speaking of ideals or something beautiful, but he could also be angry, bitter and full of ugly prejudices I couldn’t understand and hated hearing.<\/p>\n

He was 45 when I was born in 1966. There was almost a generation and a half between us. I grew up hearing older music and hearing stories of his childhood back in the thirties, of some world where values were less complicated than what I’d seen growing up into my first dozen years.<\/p>\n

I mined all my father’s stories for facts and truths, memorizing what I could. I wouldn’t question their veracity or silently call bullshit on their biases until years after their author had left the world. It took me a long time to start unraveling likely truths from glorifications. He came with his own mythologies about himself and my mother, and I’ve played with them all like a kitten at a ball or yarn. Each story has remained a gift and an artifact of his life, lived from October 18, 1921 until November 4, 1989. In 2021, when I reached the age of 55, his birthday had become a century old.<\/p>\n

After many years of recycling my Dad’s tales through my head and heart, they are the things that have outlived him by more than thirty five years. They just feel like really old tales now, like voices echoing down a long hallway. He has become almost like an ancestor to me, but one whom I lived through and whose words are like little ghosts of the past that still help me in my present.<\/p>\n

\n

\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hyper-aware, self-focused, or story-focused. I don’t know but I think I must have spent my first forty years of life in one of those kinds of mental states. I can remember being a young boy, maybe 10 or 11, and wondering why I existed as a human being. I saw myself looking out from behind … Continue reading Hyper-aware, and story-focused<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,17,7],"tags":[15,16,19,11],"class_list":["post-5267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-memoirs","category-relationships","category-stories","tag-angela","tag-dad","tag-family","tag-reflection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5267"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5274,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5267\/revisions\/5274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}