Why am I doing this?

Let’s get this straight: I absolutely do not believe that I am anything special or that my thoughts need to be seen or heard by anyone. I’m not making this the way an artist releases a beautiful song, knowing that people will relate and listen to it. I guess I’m making this for the same reason you flush a poop. You make the poop, you flush it. It goes into the world, spreads its wings, and does whatever poops do when they fly away.  

I don’t want to write all my thoughts down and have them clogging up my laptop toilet. I’m setting them free to spread their wings and go where they want to go. Maybe I’ll spend hours formulating one opinion, only to learn later that I was wrong and need to re-evaluate everything. I don’t care, that’s life. 

My main aim is for my family and close friends to read this, to see where I’m at, and hopefully you’ll take some of my advice, because you guys know how awesome and smart I am, and you’ll probably do everything I say, I guess. That’s if I give advice. I don’t really know what this is yet. 

Anyway, I’m doing this because I’m an overthinker. I have too many thoughts, and I need to put them somewhere. Sure, I can put them in a journal and keep them private like a sane person, but where is the fun in that? Why not put every single tiny detail of the inside of my brain online for everyone to see and judge mercilessly?!  

I am doing this because I am SO BORED OF SECRETS. 

I am BORED of trying to be cool and mysterious and charismatic. I am bored of not replying on group chats because I don’t want people to think I’m too interested in anything. I’m bored of using snapchat filters because I don’t want anyone to know I have real life skin. I’m exhausted. I have been masking my true self for YEARS and I am tired. I am sick of meeting people, day in, day out, and knowing that they’re not presenting me with their true selves. It is wasting everyone’s time. 

In the space of 30 minutes at home, my true self might laugh at her own farts, contemplate suicide, talk to inanimate objects, accidentally slice a large chunk of skin off doing some weird dangerous beauty regime, sing at the top of her lungs, get annoyed by that little bit of black stuff that always seems to be stuck in the top left corner of her big toe, and shout random phrases from TV shows at the ceiling.  

In 8 hours at work, I just do my work. I say hello to a couple of people, smile when people walk past, maybe pretend to laugh at someone saying “back to it!” after break. Meanwhile, my true self is SCREAMING. “LET ME SAY THIS FUNNY THING! I DON’T CARE IF THEY DON’T LAUGH! LET ME DO A DANCE! PLEASE! I’M DESPERATE! I DON’T CARE IF PEOPLE ARE LOOKING!” I have to CONSTANTLY silence my true self. And she is getting pretty pissed off. 

“When we’re alone, we’re all the same as each other”

– James Morrison

My favourite quote, ever, has always been “when we’re alone, we’re all the same as each other”. This is really random, because it’s actually from a James Morrison song. He was famous for about ten minutes and I didn’t particularly like him. I remember that the first time I listened to the song that the quote was from, I was sitting on a bus, and boy, did that sentence launch me into space. I was only around 16 at the time, and was starting to really obsess over my identity, and the thoughts that I was different from everyone else had been slowly simmering away in a giant shitty poop cauldron since around age 12.  

I remember being sat in assembly when a discussion broke out – a beautiful, clean, popular girl was talking about how some people pick their nose and pee in the shower. Everyone around was nodding and agreeing about how gross it was. I piped up “I do that”. (I committed social suicide very often at school but was too deep in my own world to realise that people made fun of me). Everyone “bleugh”ed and “ew”ed. I didn’t understand. I thought, “how else do you get the deepest and trickiest of bogeys out?!” To be honest, peeing in the shower is probably… conventionally pretty gross, but I’m still sure a couple of people in my tutor group were lying about it. 

The point being, “when we’re alone, we’re all the same as each other” stuck with me for years. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought about it constantly. Why is everyone acting differently when they’re alone? As a child, I acted the same everywhere I went. It didn’t matter who I was with or what situation I was in. I felt how I felt and I expressed it. Why did it need to be different now that I was growing up? Why were people starting to look at me weirdly when I said or did things? People were starting to have an opinion on things about me that I didn’t understand – people commented on my clothes, the music I liked, the size of my breasts – why? I had absolutely no opinions on anyone, I just saw everyone as they were and never thought about what they were wearing or how they were conducting themselves. I thought things like “wow, that girl really loves horses. I don’t know anything about horses.” and, “woah, that girl has such furry boots. I bet they’re super warm.” Was I a basically a 14 year old Kimmy Schmidt? Yes. But why wasn’t I allowed to be the same with other people as I was when I was by myself? 

“All burps smell bad, they’re the farts of the face”

– Kimmy

Overthinking

All my life I have thought of overthinking as a “curse”. I would look at people around me who seemed to be in the moment – plodding along, seemingly on auto-pilot. How can they just.. walk in the bathroom and get into the shower? Why aren’t they obsessing over how much dirty laundry they will create? Or how long it will take them to get wet, get soapy, get wet again, then get dry again? Is there any point in showers? How did our ancestors shower? They didn’t use soap, surely? Were they just dirty? Covered in spots? Did it matter? Did they wash in the river? Was it dirty? Did they get infections? Or was it all fine? Do we have it wrong? Why have I spent all this time standing here having these thoughts so that it’s now my son’s bedtime and I don’t have time to shower? 

I admit, as a teen/young adult, I thought of these people as… “stupid”. I’m just being honest. I was wrong – bear with me. People who walk into a room, greet everyone, just be themselves and don’t seem to worry about whether everyone thinks they’re weird, or they don’t belong there. They just assume they do belong. People who get up in the morning, get ready for work every single day, go to work, do their work, come home, eat, shower, sleep, whatever. I did NOT understand these people.

I was SO jealous of these people. How on EARTH did they do that? Did they have endless streams of dopamine and serotonin? Did they have no internal monologue, and their body just.. Did stuff? Without thinking? How is that possible? Have they never suffered with mental health problems? Were they so satisfied and content with life and the upbringing they had that they just had absolutely no awareness that others were suffering? 

My entire life I was debilitated by THOUGHTS. Constant thoughts. Overlapping, deafening, impossible to drown out, thoughts. I assumed the thoughts were “me”, and that something was wrong with me. And for a long time I thought I was the only person with this experience, because I never talked about it.  

It turns out, overthinking isn’t a curse – it’s my superpower. Or at least, I like to see it that way. I can think my way out of anything. It took me a long time to realise that a lot of these people who seem to be living their best life, completely immune to the overthinking curse, are also suffering in other ways – or – they will eventually come across trauma. Then they will suffer, and they will suffer terribly. Maybe they are sure they are going where they want in life, and that’s what gives them the drive. What if they are lacking the self awareness they need to tell them that where they’re headed isn’t where they want to go? What will happen when they find out? They have spent their whole lives underthinking – maybe just.. Reacting to the world around them, rather than seeing opportunities to manipulate and go against the grain.  

Maybe you have been an overthinker too, like me, and haven’t found out yet that you are not your thoughts, and you get to choose the paths you travel along when you are thinking. You aren’t a prisoner. 

The point is – I have given up trying not to overthink. I tried for years to drown out my thinking with meditations and breathing (I still love those things, but I still overthink!). I will overthink and overthink to my heart’s content, and I’ll see it positively, thank you very much!  

So, if you’re an underthinker, an averagethinker, or a lost and drowning overthinker, let me do some of your thinking for you! 

I will always make time to think, and that time might be time someone else doesn’t have. I listen to podcasts, I sit in silence, I read, I journal, and during all of those things, I think. If you have a two year old attached to your hip, or are working twice as much as I am, chances are you can’t do that.  

So how about, I compile everything I learn while listening, reading, sitting or journaling, into a nice, neat little package? That way, people who don’t have the time, space, or energy to learn their favourite way to think, can borrow my thinking, until they’re ready to do their own! 

The way a scientist would systematically review relevant studies on similar subjects and pack them into one neat paper to give a conclusion; I am systematically reviewing every bit of information that I come across about anything that might help make you happier, thinking about how it applies to me (thereby giving an example of how it could apply to you), and giving a conclusion, which is this page.  

Family and friends, rejoice! You don’t have to sit and listen to me waffle on, and pretend to plan on listening to a 2 hour long podcasts I’ve sent you! It’s all here!