tl;dr: When I try to think, the thoughts just dissipate like dreams fading away as I try to grab them. Like the neurons are firing signals and they're falling short and vanishing into a mist before they reach a target. Am I broken?


When I try to think, my brain grinds like an old, overworked computer with too many programs open to process. I think it has always been that way. 

I can think critically and logically as long as what I have to think about doesn't take up too much of my RAM at one time. If information fits on one page, I can learn it, but I easily get lost when it's more complex than that. Trying to focus my thoughts is like trying to look at floaters in my eyes. The harder I try to see them, the quicker they slip away.

In conversation, if there are two people present, I dissociate quickly so they can carry on a normal conversation. Otherwise, I make every effort to avoid social interaction, especially in real-time. I can't think fast enough to participate in a conversation. 

I haven't been able to hold a job for more than a few months in my adult life, and I have been unemployed for the past couple years. In most cases, I quit jobs because I can't deal with the boss asking how things are going all day every day. It's overwhelming. Meetings are torture. Because I can't be there, even if I am physically there. At this point, I'm not sure if I can think clearly enough to learn new job skills anyway.

Sometimes, just sitting, I can feel my brain go numb and tingly. One of my jobs involved medical imaging, and we needed to test the machine, so I volunteered to have my brain imaged. I didn't see anything that stood out as pathological in the scans. Some mild pituitary calcification, but the radiologist told me it was nothing unusual when I asked about it. Ugh, now I'm realizing that 

I'm currently self-employed, but not very productive at all. I spend all day most days making spreadsheets and checklists for projects, but everything is puzzle pieces I can't hold in my head long enough to put together. I try to treat the planning work as the edge pieces of the puzzle, but it doesn't seem to help. When I try to think, the thoughts just dissipate like dreams fading away as I try to grab them. Like the neurons are firing signals and they're falling short and vanishing into a mist before they reach a target.

Is this a thing anyone has encountered in mental health? 

Is this just the way brains are?