Dear Overthinking Habit,
Why can’t you take a break?
Even though I have recently realised and acknowledged that I practise you, it seems like I have known you forever. Like you have always been there, dormant, unostentatious, hidden, but alive and secretly persistent.
When I first learnt about you, it was almost like discovering introversion, minus the comfort and relatability, of course. Initially, it felt that the acknowledgement would help get rid of you, but I didn’t know that you had inescapably engulfed my cognitive processes. I didn’t know that you were there to stay, like a chronic disease that I will have to learn to live with. I didn’t know about your mastery or your relentless creativity.
Seriously, don’t you get bored? Tormenting the already tormented ones and shrouding happiness in lives where you haven’t even been invited? I mean, sure, it must be interesting to link one point of the story to another unrelated one, tie one knot after another, bend bones as if in a twister game, and transform simple matters into convoluted ruminations.
But the aftermath? Who will take care of that? Who will console and unravel the knots? Who will dare to sort confusions and misunderstandings and long silences? You are never present to face the doomed relations and moods. To be specific, doomed by your perfectly carved perceptions. Perhaps you’re only there to witness them. Maybe you relish the collapse and the damage.
I’m confused about how you are so persistent. Are you proud of what you do? I’m asking this because you seem like a rational and caring friend initially. The one who carefully and logically analyses every detail of the available story. You market yourself as the saviour who will untangle the interlaced disputes and that you’ll caress one’s head like an endearing friend or a loving mother. You broadcast the mind with assertions where you are right, just, and supportive. But you don’t do any of it.
Instead, you form real-like hypothetical scenarios that draw life and laughter out of a being. You brilliantly produce and direct the life story as if you knew everything — the perceptions and actions of mine and others. Do you really know what goes on in the mind of others? Or do you reside there too? To complicate matters at an advanced level. And you tend to go on until the brain is tired enough to sleep and then wake up to remember everything back.
Don’t you realise that you’re entirely futile? Nothing ever alters just because you happen. People still leave, they still judge unconditionally and love conditionally, and they still give up on others for reasons unfathomable.
Then why can’t you be stopped? Is it because you capitalise on someone’s quality to care too much? Do you really care that much? I don’t know.
Anyway, rambling about the past disasters you have caused is futile. Perhaps there is no easy and quick way to get rid of you, and maybe there never will be. But that doesn’t mean there is no way at all. There’s a vague, unsure one amidst the series of thorny bushes. It is like finding hope when everything is lost. From far, it seems non-doable and dangerous, but in time, and with a bit of strain in the neck and the gaze, the path is clear as if presented under the stage light.
It is of patience and perpetual mindfulness. And of love and listening and acknowledgement and comfort. An ability to remember and tell you that your stories aren’t real. They can be, but they also cannot be. It is a path of the non-lasting ability of the loved ones to assure that everything will be alright even if it probably wouldn’t be. Their enduring power to siphon off all the neglect and isolation and indifference. A path of warmth and acceptance.
Dear Overthinking habit,
I know that nothing would ever be enough to eradicate you from my life. But a few holidays won’t hurt. Why can’t you take a break this year? Let 2022 be a light year. Let it be free of you. Let this year be like the free-floating clouds, not the rooted, latticed branches. Please don’t care so much. Please take a break.
