The best and worst part about me, the main thing that makes me who I am, is that I think a lot. 

The way I think is rather weird; there are layers/sections/somethings of my mind. Most of them handle a single thing at a time (though for whatever reason singing tends to count as a only one or two things despite the large number of elements you have to keep track of to do it well), but one of them is devoted to my senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell. Not hearing though, except on rare occasion my hearing gets its own level of consciousness.

I have really good hearing. This doesn't have much to do with my ears; in fact, my left ear has some ranges it can't pick up on very well. But I actually pay attention to what I'm hearing (in fact, because of how my mental layering system works I really can't STOP paying attention)  and so I hear a whole lot more than the average person does. The downside to this is that I'm very likely to get sound-induced headaches, especially since recently either the sensitivity of my ears or the volume of my mind increased by what often feels like nearly tenfold. It can also make it VERY hard to get to sleep. 

And then above those two layers, I have some indeterminate number of layers that deal with my thoughts. I always have to have at least two running at once; normally one of them handles my actual thinking and the other handles whatever I happen to be doing. Because of this, it is necessary for me to always be doing something. That's a big part of why I like reading, especially now that I have a Nook and so can carry a library's worth of books around instead of just two or three at a time. (And yes, I do need to have multiple books, I read REALLY fast. Not quite one-glance-and-I've-read-the-entire-page fast, but sometimes in school we'll be instructed to read something independently, and generally I could finish it twenty times in the allotted time.) And a lot of the time in class, I wind up bouncing my leg up and down or fiddling with an eraser, because I need something to occupy the free part of my brain before I go crazy. Weirdly, the leg-bouncing only gets faster when I don't have energy to spare for it. Like, is my body TRYING to sabotage itself? My need to always be doing something also makes it hard to get to sleep, partly because it's hard to convince myself to stop doing stuff and try to sleep, and partly because my constantly racing thoughts make it hard to slip away from alertness. 

Needless to say, I tend to be pretty sleep-deprived. I'm used to it, but it is getting worse as I grow older and my brain gets more and more refined. It's starting to actually be a problem. 

Why is this saying that it's a draft? I'm pretty sure I published it... Huh. Well, it's published now if it wasn't before!