My mom has the amazing gift of premonition. She gets “feelings” about things, about what should happen and what will happen, and we all pretty much trust her premonitions. So much so that when she says “I have a feeling a red propeller plane is going to crash into the neighbors roof someday soon,” we all start watching the sky, assuming there will be a red propeller plane above our heads. If I’m wondering about something (Should I move to Africa? Will grandma’s surgery go okay?), I ask her if she has any feelings about it, and I cross my fingers that she does. She doesn’t have premonitions about everything, she’s not a prophet after all, but when she does, I believe her “feelings” whole-heartedly.

I, however, did not genetically inherit this gift. Quite the opposite actually as I have no idea what people mean when they tell me to listen to my gut. Gut reactions, maybe, that’s more like instinct. But gut feelings, as in intuition, as in ”My gut tells me to take the train this time instead of flying,” are foreign to me. That’s why I struggle so much with every little decision. My gut fails me everytime, and I’m left with nothing but logic to work through my choices. And when there is no obviously logical answer, I’m basically wandering around in the dark without a flashlight. I just don’t get gut feelings.

I also don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. Once in 7th grade, a somewhat rebellious girl who had somewhat befriended me, offered me a cigarette. Not a lit one, just one to take home and try sometime. So I took it and stashed it underneath the cardboard in an old perfume box set, which I then buried under some clothes in my bottom dresser drawer. It stayed there for years until most of the tobacco had fallen out of the paper. I used to take it out and fondle the thing paper now and then, but I never once had a true desire to smoke it. And other than that brief and insignificant brush with the smoker’s life, I’ve never even been tempted. It doesn’t appeal to me in the least.

(For awhile, I did smoke cigars occassionally, without inhaling of course, and I still enjoy a cigar now and then in the right environment. But I find cigarettes absolutely appalling.)

You wouldn’t think these two things were connected, the missing gut feelings and the lack of desire to ever smoke. And I didn’t think so either until this morning. On my drive to work, some radio DJ told me about a few patients who had received damage to a certain part of their brain. When they came out of a coma, they no longer had the desire to smoke. At all. They didn’t even think about it.

Doctors toyed with the idea of tinkering with that part of the human brain in order to allow long-time smokers to shake their addiction. However, they discovered that that is the same part of the brain that controls our gut reactions.

So as you can see, I have brain damage. Apparently I was dropped a lot as a child, or perhaps my brother hit me in the head a few too many times when we were growing up. Which is why I not only stress out about every little decision I have to make, but why I can’t have a cigarette to take the edge off when I’m about to jump out a window from the struggle.