Good evening ladies and gentleman
I will be the first to admit i spend far too long lost in my own thoughts. I could spend hours up there, barely even noticing the world happening around me. It’s as if I’m wandering the skies of a rainy day, jumping from cloud to cloud, thoughts coming from here and there, left and right dodging as if the rain would melt my soul.
I’ve never thought much of it because i thought everyone was like it.
I am an over thinker, in simple terms. I have never been a fan of such a contrived, rather simplistic way of explaining something so notoriously complex, but that is how this is understood or defined by our wider society. I look to understand, for without understanding, we cannot learn. I welcome mistakes and expect anything but perfection, for a desire for perfection will make only for bitter disappointment.
The thing that i often struggle with is what if you are never able to understand? Maybe there are aspects of life, love and everything in between you are not supposed to understand, or should just never expect to be able to? Moreover than that- what happens if your understanding is just…wrong?
The only way i can think of it to describe this issue is for it to be akin to a cycle. Again and again, doing the same thing, the same way for the same length of time and expecting a different result. This in itself is the definition of madness, yet its something I’ve stuck to in the same bloody minded fashion for so long now. Truth is after a certain point it’s hard to know and harder still to believe there can be anything else.
It’s from this lack of understanding, created from an obsession in gaining understanding (irony) that creates fear, an anxiety that builds the walls higher and pushes everyone you know so far away you feel like you’re going to be alone forever. This life I have created, this idea of myself, the cycle i feel like i’ve been living on for so long, is all my own doing. This is what i’ve always said about Thinking Evolution- we must learn to understand and then critically the part i’ve been missing- we must then evolve.
For from this evolution comes surprise.
Surprise is a mad mad thing because to an anxious mind surprise it is a powerfully terrifying concept. Surprise is often not part of the vocabulary of the anxious, it generally being substituted with”unpredictable.” When you feel like you need to be ready to go and be prepared for any situation or possibility, when you spend a long time thinking of every possible scenario, however ridiculous you imagine them to be because the alternative is you wound up in an “unpredictable” situation. This can never happen.
In my experience is this no more appropriate with people. There are a lot of people that have a role to play in my life, that serve a purpose and are useful as an acquaintance. Do i know that many people? Do many people know me- the real me? I am as close as to myself in these words stretching out across the screen, but does anybody really believe that- what would they ever imagine me to be?
Those i know, those i trust- i love them dearly, would do anything for them and trust them with anything. Those wonderful, mad, eccentrically brilliant human beings are proof the cycle isn’t the only method for learning about life. They really are the best of me and i wouldn’t be half the man i am today without them. What if there was another way of breaking through those walls i’ve built so high- surely they are proof of this?
So, this may have happened. I’ve always believed you make mistakes for a reason, so you can rectify and improve from them. I do what i can to gain impressions of people, then, because trusting someone is a remarkably rare thing for me to ever do and then maybe they become something more to you. To come back to an earlier point- what do you do if you may have been wrong- what if you fell for a ruse she plays so people can’t see her- the same way you have been for longer than i can remember.
Maybe i do it to protect myself- or my “peace.” Or maybe I’m just scared of caring about someone i don’t know a whole lot about? I’ve been off the mark with this person so many times its near impossible to pinpoint. She, in many ways, broke the cycle. It’s happened before, but only now have i realised the cycle of behaviours has been a consistent issue for this long.
I wanted her to be something she wanted me to see, because the alternative is someone i might just care about. I’ve always wanted to not care- about anyone. Instead just on the “let them live and ruin whatever they do for as long as they like, but i’m just not built like that.” I wanted her to hate me, because hate is predictable and can be explained. I once treated people like broken jigsaw puzzles, tasking myself to be the one to put the pieces back together. This time, someone surprised me, thats all she did. She surprised me.
She broke a part of me ultimately. Im not saying we are going to be the best of friends but between her and a friend talking it through with me, something needed to change. Breaking a cycle thats been in place longer than i can remember.
Again, my friends, always the best of me.
Fail better…be better – Peter Dinklage.
Yours, with love as always.
D. R x
