At some point during a lecture, you realise you’ve been copying without listening. Your notebook is open. The handwriting is yours. The sentences make sense on their own. You just don’t remember deciding to write any of them. This is usually when you sit up a little straighter, as if posture might fix things. It doesn’t. The person speaking is still mid-explanation. People around you are still following along, but you aren’t. I’ve spoken about this with a friend before. I remember a particularly interesting email that I wrote to her about brain fatigue. “It’s just called zoning out, Nikki, it’s not that deep”, she replied.
It’s strange how invisible this state is from the outside. To anyone looking, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. There’s something oddly comforting about that. It acts as a temporary escape, almost as if you’re on airplane mode and every noise around you has faded into the background. Nothing pulls you away. There’s no distraction to blame. You’re not on your phone. You’re not thinking about anything urgent. You’re just elsewhere, in a way that doesn’t require effort.
The lecture moved on. So did I. Whatever I missed didn’t come back to cause any problems. Nothing bad happened. And that almost made it worse. It felt less like an accident and more like my brain had decided this part wasn’t worth paying attention to. That unsettled me more than being distracted ever does. Distraction at least has a reason. This didn’t. It wasn’t useful, or entertaining, or urgent. It just happened, without explanation. By the time the class ended, I stopped trying to figure out what I’d missed. There was nothing specific to recover. Just a chunk of time I couldn’t account for, sitting somewhere between when I arrived and when I left.