THIS IS A TRUE STORY IN MY LIFE, NOTHING IS FABRICATED AND I AM SURE YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT
In a bustling yet lonely city for a man named Benjamin, his life is filled with uniqueness that is difficult to explain to others. Since childhood, he has realized that his mind does not work like most people. His memory and understanding of the world are so sharp, as if his brain is an infinite storage, recording every event in detail that is impossible to forget. He can remember meetings 10 or even 30 years ago, complete with seconds, hours, and words spoken, as if it all happened yesterday.
However, this ability is not a blessing for Benjamin, but something that makes him feel more and more tortured every day. His brain never stops working. When other people can forget painful events or just forget small details in their lives, Benjamin remembers everything. Even in his sleep, his brain remains active, allowing him to only rest for two to three hours each night. Sleep is not a place of rest for him, but a new chapter of his thoughts that continue to run.
His extraordinary sensitivity to sound makes things worse. Every drop of rain that falls can be heard so clearly, as if it were magnified in his mind. He once tried listening to relaxing music to sleep, but instead of feeling calm, he stayed awake, aware of every change in tone in the song being played. While other people only needed three minutes to fall asleep, he had to stay awake all night without being able to close his eyes.
This ability is not only limited to memory and hearing. Benjamin also has an incredibly strong imagination. When someone tells him an incident, he can imagine the event so clearly, as if he were there himself. And what's even stranger, if the story told to him is a lie, the imagination will not appear. It's as if his mind has a truth sensor that can distinguish between what is real and what is made up.
His ability to analyze events and read someone's behavior patterns is also not to be ignored. He is often able to guess the storyline of a conversation just from the first word someone says. Even in cyberspace, he can predict how an interaction will end. Once, he warned a friend about a video call scam trap that would make him a victim of blackmail, and sure enough, the scenario happened exactly as he predicted.
More than just understanding the present, Benjamin has a much more terrifying ability: he can create future scenarios, and everything he plans always happens. Since childhood, he has made various life plans, from getting to know a governor and becoming his favorite to getting a job without having to apply, everything happened according to what he had previously thought. At first, he enjoyed this, but as time went on, he began to feel afraid. He was afraid to create new scenarios because he realized that if he thought about something, it would come true.
The strangeness he felt within himself became more pronounced when he realized that he was more comfortable hanging out with people much older than him. The regional secretary, high-ranking officials, and important figures were the people who always supported him, but they were all over 60 years old. He was afraid of losing them one by one, especially his father, the only person who truly understood him and was his place to share. For him, if one day his father was gone, then this world would feel empty and he might lose his sanity.
His close relationship with his father made him not need peers. He did know many people, but none of them could be called true friends. Only with his father could he talk comfortably. However, with the realization that time was passing and his father was getting older, he began to be haunted by the fear of being alone.
As his thoughts became increasingly uncontrollable, he looked for a way to stop all this. Not with drugs or alcohol, but with a way that he believed could stop the future scenarios that kept appearing in his mind. He tried various methods, even martusbashi, just to stop his thoughts from spinning endlessly.
However, the most worrying thing was that he often talked to himself. When driving, he felt like there was someone next to him, arguing with him, even though he knew he was alone. All of this made it increasingly difficult to distinguish whether he could still be called a normal human being or not. Sometimes, he thought that he was not an ordinary human being, but something else—something with eyes as a camera, ears as a voice recorder, and a brain as an unlimited data storage, perhaps as large as 100 million terabytes.
His other experiences further strengthened the strangeness he felt. During Friday prayers in a crowded mosque, he was able to recognize the voices of everyone saying "Aamiin" in unison. When he was in Jakarta with his father, he could hear the sound of a woman's moans coming from the room of an official they knew, even though the room was four rooms away from where they were staying. When they finally saw the woman come out of the room, his father was surprised by Benjamin's accuracy in observing.
Even when it came to reciting the Koran, he realized that he was not reading the letters one by one like other people, but rather memorizing everything directly. This made him feel increasingly different, increasingly strange, and increasingly difficult to explain who he really was.
He had long thought about telling someone all this, but fear kept him from talking. He was afraid of being considered a hallucination, or worse, being labeled as crazy. How could anyone else understand all this? Even if he went to a psychologist, he was not sure they would understand or help him.
However, there was one thing he realized: he needed help. He could not continue to live in fear and mental exhaustion like this. He wanted to find a way to control his thoughts, so that he could live his life more peacefully.
He wanted to know, was there a way out for someone like him?