I Was The Last Place I Looked

My Brain Filed Me Under Irrelevant

I just spent five minutes searching for my phone while using its flashlight to look under the car seat.

Five minutes. The phone was in my hand the entire time, patiently shining a light on my stupidity like a tiny helpful witness to my own unravelling.

I want to be clear about the timeline here.

One minute in, I checked my pockets. Twice.

Two minutes in, I retraced my steps back into the house.

Three minutes in, I asked my partner if they’d seen it, which they hadn’t, but they must have watched me leave the room holding it, without saying anything.

Four minutes in, I was on my hands and knees, phone outstretched, sweeping light under the car seat like I was searching for evidence at a crime scene.

My partner said nothing because she knows!

There’s a look she gives me now, somewhere between concern and morbid fascination, like it’s a nature documentary and she doesn’t want to startle the animal.

The phone, I’m sure you guessed, was in my hand the whole time.

The Brain, It Turns Out, Has Opinions

What gets me is the confidence.

I wasn’t hesitating or second-guessing.

I had a search strategy.

I was eliminating locations with real purpose and genuine focus, all while holding the object I was looking for like some kind of deranged magician who’d forgotten the trick.

My brain had simply decided the phone wasn’t relevant information worth sharing with me. It had filed it under “permanent fixture, like hands or feet” and moved on without so much as a hint.

Which raises the obvious question. What else has it filed away without consulting me?

Probably too much, if I’m being realistic.

A Guest With Limited Permissions

I’ve come to accept that I am not the primary user of my own brain. I am more like a lodger who thinks they run the house because they occasionally choose what to have for dinner.

Meanwhile the actual management is upstairs making decisions, running routines, and operating systems I didn’t install and can’t access.

It’s efficient. It handles most of your day without asking for your input because, frankly, it doesn’t need it.

You approved these routines years ago and it’s been running them on your behalf ever since.

The slightly uncomfortable part is this.

That same system handles more than where you put your phone.

It handles what you avoid. What you keep meaning to change. The version of yourself you’ve been planning to become since roughly 2019.

All quietly managed by a brain that has decided the current setup is probably fine.

It is not fine.

But that’s a problem for tomorrow, apparently.

Right now I need to find my phone, again.