Thinking about thinking

Thinking too much. This morning F told me that quarantine has been forcing him into thinking too much. About who he is and his life and stuff. I just thought: that’s just a regular day for me.

I’ve always thought too much. In fact, my brain is wired in such a way that I can juggle multiple lines of thought all at once. I mean, at any given moment I’m worrying about my lessons at the same that I’m planning what I’m going to have for lunch and wondering if I’m really never going to have children. And on top of all that, I’m trying to take a mental note to check the pronunciation of “contract” (the verb, not the noun). Does it become an oxytone when it’s used as a verb? Does meaning factor into the pronunciation?

My head is always noisy. So much so that I believed everybody else’s head to be just as busy as mine. The only time I actually entertained the possibility that other people’s brains work differently was at age thirty, when I first took Ritalin. All of a sudden, my mind went quiet and I only had one line of thought (which of course was “where the hell are my other thoughts?”). It was like a punch in the stomach, this deafening silence. The medication never had the same effect on me again, but I will never forget that first day.

Anyway, all this to say that F’s comment made me think about the fact that perhaps the reason I’m not freaking out over all this “alone time” is because overthinking has always been the norm for me. Then it occurred to me just how useless 90 percent of my thoughts are, as they rarely lead to action. And I’m used to this, I don’t expect anything remotely productive to come out of my musings.

Doomsday scenarios and ruthless self-realizations aren’t as painful to me because they’ve always been part of my everyday life. Some people don’t understand how I can see my flaws and my shortcomings and not do anything about them. I acknowledge their existence, just as I acknowledge my powerlessness against most of them. And it took my many years of therapy to accept this.

I wonder if there’s an inherited passiveness to those who think too much, who see too much, as actions cannot possibly keep up with their over-active brains. If that’s the case, I guess that’s the price we pay for the pleasure of thinking.

I was going to share these ideas with F, but decided against it, as it would probably be overwhelming for an 18-year-old. Instead, I chose to write my ideas down here.

So I stand corrected: some of my thoughts do lead to action.