I wake wondering what my brain’s been up to.

                  I say “my” because the noun needs a possessive. It is not your brain or theirs or owned in common. But it’s no more mine than you are – or Jane – or dog-pal Henry. I contain it, carry it, feed it, care for it, but it has its own life, habits, notions distinct from those I’d call mine.

                  Saying this aloud sounds loony – to me too. It cannot be literally true. At a minimum my brain and I are co-dependents: neither could survive without the other. But I feel I’m my brain’s observer, supervisor, caretaker, not its master. Granted, its output defines me, but its conduct defies me.

                  It’s a tireless worker – I’ll give it that. While limbs and senses sleep, exhausted from their exertions, the brain chugs along, assessing, rearranging, handling janitorial tasks having to do with lymphs, hormones, mitochondria and other metabolic hardware I could never explain. (I was a good student, but science escaped me.) It sorts and stores yesterday’s data, noting new connections, while contriving whacky movies that used to be rated R. After “a good night’s sleep,” that sweetest of benisons, it’s raring to get going, speeding through matutinal chores to reach the empty page, where you find it now. To say I am wielding my pen this moment is both true and false. Yes, my fingers are bobbing and script scrolling, but it’s my brain doing the driving, not anyone I could call I. The parent of a gifted child, it behooves me to tend my brain, protect it from itself and get out of its way.

                  I love waking because that’s when my brain’s most eager and surprising. I had no idea forty minutes ago what was “on my mind,” and now look, I’m half done with my daily six hundred words. How did that happen! I allowed it to, I opened my book and uncapped my pen, but I insist these sentences are not my doing. Hamlet, too, wrestled this paradox: 

If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not. Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? 

                  That my words are involuntary – at least at the get-go – does not mean they’re good. My brain has its good days and bad just like any other body part. It does mean I’m always anxious about my brain’s condition. Far from “the master of my fate,” I’m a panicked passenger on a midocean dinghy, praying not to capsize. My brain is a prima donna (to switch metaphors) threatening pouts and strikes, whom I tiptoe around not to get its goat. When it’s feeling OK, as this morning, I breathe easier. When it sullenly sulks in its room, refusing even favorite foods, I freak.

                  This account is not a conceit, like one of those metaphysical poets’ crazy comparisons. It’s how I – and maybe you – experience existence. I am not, as my grandkids say, “the boss of me,” so must handle myself with care. Nor do I take credit when my brain performs OK. Carll does it not. Carll denies it. Who does it then?

                  Needless to say, I present myself as my brain’s proprietor, not to rattle those I encounter. I maintain an illusion of “self-control.” But it’s a fiction. If things go well, it’s luck; if not, yikes.

                  This is why vanity is manifest folly. Only idiots boast.