Bad Thoughts

I have a problem. A thinking problem. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been prone to these really bad thoughts, unspeakable thoughts the likes of which probably never cross the minds of more well-adjusted people, or if they do, cross only very occasionally (in passing, if you will), rather than crossing and re-crossing like school crossing guards, as they tend to in my case.

Disclaimer: I don’t mean psychopathic thoughts, like about torturing small animals, as that would imply a measure of predictability altogether absent from these thoughts. My bad thoughts are more scattershot in terms of content, but their inevitable outcome is awkwardness: they make me feel incredibly awkward, these thoughts, and would doubtless make the other people involved in them feel even more awkward if ever they were made privy to them, which I hope to God they never are.

It’s fairly obvious to me where these thoughts stem from. My parents were very strict disciplinarians, and growing up I never had much opportunity to act out. Consequently, for as long as I can remember I’ve resorted instead to ‘thinking out’ — taking refuge inside my imagination, simulating the various misbehaviors with which I might rebuke my parents, and thereby extracting some inkling of the pleasure these misbehaviors (if enacted) would occasion, while avoiding the world of pain sure to follow.

Unfortunately, at some point this tendency of ‘thinking out’ turned into an unconscious reflex, impossible to control.

And I mean impossible.

I first became aware of this early in high school. My great aunt Lucia — my namesake, incidentally — used to give me rides to school (by this point my parents were nastily divorced and I stayed most the time at Lucia’s place), and one day as we were riding along I abruptly began to imagine what it would be like if I buried my face in Lucia’s crotch — if, in other words, I gave my own great aunt road-head.

The moment this grotesque thought occurred to me I tried my utmost to stifle it. Alas, as in that joke about the pink elephants, trying not to think about something is a surefire way to continue thinking about it, which I did, in ever-higher resolution — picturing my mouth suctioned onto aunt Lucia’s twat, my tongue digging into the grey coils of her pubes, and so on — while in reality I pressed myself against the passenger door as if to physically distance myself from the unwitting object of my terrible thought.

From then on, I could never ride to or from school with Lucia without resuscitating this thought and its almost overwhelmingly uncomfortable visuals, which would have me literally curling my toes and/or biting on my forearm in discomfort, trying in vain to think of something (anything) else instead.

My great aunt Lucia was already pretty old at the time, early seventies as I recall, and well past her physical prime. I don’t mean to suggest that it would have made much of a difference if my great aunt were a supermodel in her mid-forties — the thought of going down on your great aunt is disgusting any way you slice it — but at least in that case I could’ve chalked it up to a little illicit crush and put the thing to bed. Yet Lucia was not in the least bit attractive to me, ergo this visual didn’t make any sense. It seemed like something my brain had hatched up for the express purpose of fucking with me, of grossing me out almost to the point that I couldn’t even speak, which made for some awkward car rides where poor Lucia probably thought I was mad at her or just being a typical adolescent b*tch.

For a while I thought this sort of thought might be something everybody dealt with, i.e. an evolutionary reflex, comparable to the perverse urge to jump that one experiences when perched up on a cliff or precipice. I remember hearing or reading somewhere that this urge is quite common, and is actually a defense mechanism against the cliff’s danger, a way of tricking oneself into exercising greater caution, a wholly beneficent (if unpleasant) survival instinct. But it was difficult to imagine how exactly this logic might apply in the case of my great aunt Lucia: obviously I wasn’t at any real risk of bending over and licking her coochie (buried as it was under layers of belly and cotton and denim), and although it’s true that such an act, if somehow finessed, could have fatal consequences, seeing as Lucia was busy driving and might have reacted violently to an unprompted sexual advance by her own great niece, possibly swerving off the road and leaving the both of us smashed or burned to death in a ditch, it seemed a stretch to attribute this particular fantasy to a survival instinct gone haywire, meaning in all likelihood I was back to my original hypothesis, that my brain simply hated me and wanted me to suffer.

I got my permit and then my license a few months later, so fortunately I didn’t have to put up with this twisted fantasy all that long. But the habit it reflects — the habit of thinking up the worst possible thought in any given situation, just for the hell of it, as a sort of rhetorical exercise — remains with me to this day. It’s been a gift and a curse, for on the one hand it’s made me into something of a recluse, reluctant to participate in social events, but on the other hand it stands as evidence of the enduring vividness of my imagination and helps keep me entertained amid the low-stakes monotony of my career as a transcontinental stewardess.

Now, recently I had what I believed at the time to be something of a breakthrough with my thinking problem. Basically, I discovered that if instead of resisting a given bad thought I instead embraced it wholeheartedly, the thought would just sort of peter out, run out of steam all on its own.

I’ll give you an example: I was recently invited to be a bridesmaid at my second-cousin’s wedding outside Siena (we’re more friends than cousins). It was a gorgeous Tuscan wedding, exciting and destination-y for our extended family’s large expat and American contingents, and the whole shebang was going off without a hitch, except for the fact that I had this irrepressible sense that the groom, my second-cousin’s then-fiancé (and now husband), wanted to fuck me. But this was post-epiphany, so rather than resist this thought, as I’m normally wont to do, I tried to run with it and sort of double-click on it, just to see what would happen.

Now, before you start thinking I’m some kind of grade-A narcissist to even have thought this in the first place, let me just say that I did in fact catch the groom eyeing me more than once, eyeing me in a way that was all “hello there” and not just “hello there, dear cousin of my bride-to-be, how kind of you to come all this way to be at our wedding.” And this naturally sparked the problematic train of thought wherein I kept picturing myself sort of calming the groom down before his big moment of tying the knot up on the dais. But instead of mentally shutting that door and mentally hiking my panties back up, I went ahead and tried to envision this scenario in ever-greater detail.

In other words, I basically spent the whole long weekend willfully imagining myself fucking or getting fucked by the groom. I kept thinking about how during the ceremony itself he was going to accidentally glance over at me with this really carnal look in his eye. And maybe that alone isn’t such an absurd thought, after all, since isn’t that the purpose of bridesmaids, to wander the groom’s eye? To test his resolve? To see if even while smooching the consummating smooch the groom might open one eye and let it rest on someone other than his beloved, and thereby clue the congregated that here might be a match made somewhere other than heaven?

But here’s the thing. My theory really seemed to work, in that the more I tried to think about it, the more I really focused on enhancing the image of myself getting frisky with the groom on the very eve of his marriage to my second-cousin whom I love dearly, the less vivid the image became. And this tactic would have gone over well, I think, except for the fact that in the midst of attempting this, in the lead-up to the wedding, I kept actually looking intently at the groom, and he kept actually looking intently at me, and it became this game of chicken, perhaps without either one of us realizing it, and then I found myself alone in a sectioned-off room with him the afternoon before the wedding, an hour or so before the final rehearsal, and what happened next, though not nearly as bad as what I’d been envisioning or trying to envision so as to cease envisioning, was bad, though also very good, troublingly good.

In short, it was terrible, and now I think I’m actually a terrible person, rather than a good person often subject to terrible thoughts.

So my brilliant new strategy might not be so brilliant after all, if it in some way contributes to me acting on my bad thoughts, or leads me to underestimate my thoughts by labeling them as bad, i.e. not my actual thoughts, when in fact they are my actual thoughts, as in the above scenario, where I thought my brain was just screwing with me by entertaining these fantasies about fucking my second-cousin (and close friend)’s fiancé at the site of their wedding, but then I found myself in a situation where I could actually fuck him, and wanted to and then, unfortunately, did.

And so what I’m left wondering is, does anyone else struggle with this? Have you found any effective coping mechanisms? I’m at my wit’s end, here, and I could really use some help, and he’s still texting me.