I tried to write this earlier today, but I had expended all my mental energies learning HTML to build this site. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time now. I kept putting it off because I had this sinking feeling that I was biting someone else's style. Most of my overthinking has to do with this person.

Around 3 years ago I lost contact with someone who I considered one of my closest friends. They got tired of me and threw me to the curb, For pretty good reason I'd think. Around 2 years ago I decided to do something a bit impulsive. They have a neocities like this one, I always loved their website work so I took a peek what should've been just once because I wanted to see how they were doing. I was deeply bored of my own life at the time.

What I read then has left me questioning myself over and over and over. Any moment that I would have spent in the present since then has been taken up by these thoughts. Rewinding back and again the same scenarios, wondering how I could've let what happened, happen.

I wanted to put these thoughts about it somewhere. I've tried some other methods, writing it on paper and burning it up, 2 years of therapy so far, thousands of words in my notes app. It hasn't felt quite right, most of the people in my life don't know what I'm going through, and the people who I have divulged to about it just can't seem to console me. I can't really blame them. It's uncomfortable, this specific set of circumstances I mean, is deeply uncomfortable.

I'm overthinking now as I'm writing this. As if someone I know in real life is ever going to see it. It's really a deep seeded problem for me. Something I've been dealing with since way earlier in my life. I'm 24 turning 25 this year by the way, it still doesn't feel real...

Overthinking is sort of like gambling to me in that, in both cases the person in the act, thinks of themselves as special. The gambler and the overthinker are somehow chosen by God, they're so specially equipped by fate that they can make a call and watch as it comes true in front of them.

The funny thing is. The overthinker is almost right in a way.

Whenever the friend I lost (lets just bite the bullet and call them my ex.) would put me into one of their Sims games, my sim always died of a cardiac explosion. That's when they get so angry about something that they have a heart attack and die. While they were the one setting the traits of the Sim at the start of the game, the fact that it always played out the same deeply troubled me. It felt like it spoke to something true, overthinking will make you see that in every stupid coincidence.

Overthinking may seem rational at first glance but in reality it's deeply irrational. As a regular person the act of divorcing your own biases and feelings about a situation is almost impossible, it's the type of thing people study law or buddhism for, for YEARS and years. I was hoping by thinking so much some truth about my past mistakes would become revealed to me, that I'd untie a knot and learn to cope with the fact that I crossed a line I never thought I would. That I didn't even think myself capable of. All I've done for about 3 years now is gestate these ideas and tend to them in my mind no matter the pain it caused me.

Originally this post was titled "Overthinking is killing me", but that isn't entirely true, and I think that's the most insidious thing about it. I've had stomach problems for as long as I can remember really. What started as cramps in middle school has bubbled up into acid reflux, not helped by a weed dependency I've finally kicked after spending a year living in someone else's house. If my recent GI visit is anything to go by, those problems all stem from the fact I'm constantly in a state of stress. Overthinking, stressing, it can hurt you over and over but it's not usually the thing that kills you. What actually ends up happening is a kind of living death. You live in a constant state of exhaustion and fear, your body is constantly overexerted because you spend all your time thinking REALLY hard about things. The negative things you think about yourself come to make sense after hours of rationalizing to yourself and you begin to assume that everyone agrees. You curl up and hide, and you can't even fully explain to someone why you feel the way you do because when the words are just floating around in your mind they don't form into complete sentences. Words become feelings becomes pain becomes decay. People can't see pain, but they can see decay. In that moment the bad things you think about yourself come true, you begin to look weary and offputting and people get the good idea to keep their distance, thoughts become reality. I didn't want to listen to anyone when they told me to let things go, but I think after this much time feeling this way it's starting to make sense why they do.

There's something weird about it though. My therapist will tell me my brain isn't trying to kill me, it wants to keep me safe. The problem now is that as I grow older that "safety" begins to choke me out tighter and tighter. Safety as an avoidance of pain means I'm not building up any toughness. A dog licks its wounds and in doing so stops them from ever being able to scab over and heal properly. The rusty taste gets stuck in his mouth and he becomes anemic, unable to build new muscle because he's constantly bloodletting. I've been trying to go out to meet new people, I live in New York City and one of the main reasons I stuck around was because I thought as an adult I'd be able to meet swaths of new people who all believed in unique and interesting things. When I go out to meet people now, I've spent so much time drilling in my head about what to say to not look like an idiot that I barely hear the words they speak to me. Just a bunch of perfectly Safe interactions.

In that sense this blog feels like a trick. I get to let feelings out divorced from the greater life I have around them, I'm thankful a site like neocities exists and is willing to host something like this. I've always thought old websites were really cool..

Dealing with this feeling is all about finding tricks it seems. People have all sorts of remedies, but it's tough because what works for them might not work for you. I feel like this one works for me in part because it reminds me of my ex. I always admired them so deeply, I probably spent a bunch of time overthinking about that as well, not that I took the time to remember any of my irrational spirals as I was having them.

Starting on this website felt like taking a nice big DUMP. When I finished setting up the HTML and was actually gonna start writing I was feeling so relieved the post I'd written just came off kinda scatterbrained and jovial. Something interesting happened after when I headed out to the doctors office though. I was so happy to be feeling a bit better I just ran with the feeling. I was listening to anime openings and thinking about art I wanted to make and looking out onto the tops of buildings and just swelled with energy like WE ARE ALL GOING TO MAKE IT type energy. And then I got to the doctors office, and it was quiet and I had to sit down and listen. I built up AAALLL this potential energy, but I didn't have anywhere to put it.

I realized then that you can overthink positively just as much as you can negatively. Here I was feeling this illusion of grandeur, this feeling that everything would work out, I'd make a big comic, I'd learn how to dress, I'd get all my worldly desires and then my ex might see me as a person again! All that energy building up to nothing, it's basically the same thing!

Thinking is a gift, I know I make it sound like this curse, but even with ADHD making me more prone to stress-induced heart disease (source: some tumblr post I didn't do any research on.), it is a gift. It's what seperates us from apes and monkeys, the only reason we even have the ability to type and post like we do now. Sometimes I think on the train about how many hands it took to build each train car, thats the type of thing we only get because we can think baby!!

I feel like given the data I've gained making this website, the only real remedy for too much thought is action. Thoughts build potential energy, but it can only ever be potential if it isn't released. I'm gonna keep looking for new avenues like this one I think, I want to let off steam more, take up more space, I keep trying to eke out little bits and pieces and expect grace from people who aren't always willing to give it to me.

I went to see this movie with a close friend on Tuesday, All About Lily Chou Chou. It's this japanese movie about teenagers who like this musician Lily Chou Chou, or at least that's what it says on the box. The movie spends a lot more time on the kids and their struggles in life, dealing with isolation and puberty, wanting, taking, it reminded me of my ex twofold. They loved painful transgressive art, I always thought that was really cool. They showed me Lolita, the 90s version of it, when we were in highschool. After we watched it I needed them to console me because I felt like I saw myself too much in Humbert, his cowardice, his overthinking.

Lily Chou Chou reminded me of my time as a teen as well, and how serious everything felt. For some people that serious feeling isn't just hormones, things get realer than I think the average adult wants to admit. Things got serious for us too.. Always it felt serious, the one moment we ever had to breathe was with each other. And then that got serious too...

This is the type of thing I wish I could've indulged in with my friend, but 3 years out from that relationship, and even more years before then having complained about how much it stressed me out, she just didn't want to hear it. And I dont necessarily blame her, she wasn't there to know! That's just more feelings trapped away in my thoughts, but her indifference still hurt a little. Overthinking made a wall between us that I'm trying to break down now.

There's lots of illusions that play to the overthinking, I tried using dating apps to move on for a time and those left me feeling like some kind of crazy incel. The women in my life kept talking about being spoiled for choices while I couldn't even get a match. I know that's a load of crap though because it's literally a paid service, they're selling you a selection of men and women to pick from and if you want to be picky you have to fork over the dough to get any actual traction. It's like going to a frat party and getting mad when they let the girls in for free, as if the whole song and dance isn't an axis for Straight Control to begin with. (IM NOT AN INCEL LETS KEEP IT 100)

Social media does something similar. I remember as a teen I told myself I wouldn't get it because I knew it'd make me feel self conscious. But I also wanted to blow up as an internet artist so eventually I caved. All these years later I realize that to get anything out of it you have to actually be SOCIAL hence the name. Otherwise you're just spectating. I made rules to only follow artists and not any fancy models or meme pages, but even then what you get is this cropped tidied version of someone else's life. Instead of watching what is obviously fake crap on TV, you're grasping at the ghosts of people who you WISH you could be friends with but probably can't because your comment would get lost in the thousands of comments by other people thinking the same thing. It'd be like going to a music show and only ever wanting to talk to the artist on stage, I can't lie I've been that person before as well...

My dad always told me to not think so hard, at first that frustrated me, "I'd stop if I could", but then I took a strange sense of pride in it. I was the only one thinking hard enough to see forward, to realize how messed up the whole world is. While that may be partially true, I'm trying to figure out how to tame those thoughts now, because that "rational" (biased) way of thinking isn't pushing me forward now so much as its sending me in a circle, a circle thats spinning inward like a drain. In sci-fi movies when the humans ask the big AI screen to help them deal with pain the conclusion it always comes to is death. If living is so painful why would a rational being ever choose it? Luckily we are not rational beings.

If you were able to get through this, thank you. I don't feel amazing about it but I get a feeling that that's me overthinking again. I'm trying to build a tolerance to the feeling here and I hope some of my positings might help you too. Excuse the youtuber outro I'm still not the best writer but again here I am putting bad thoughts to words. The important thing here to note is that while I have all this written here and have spent the past 3 years thinking on it over and over, when you go out and meet strangers none of them can see that at a glance. No one knows the painful thoughts you hold inside, and while that seems like a curse if anything it's more like a blessing. You can always run away and build something new somewhere else the world is just that vast. That sounds selfish but I've learned from the people I admire that there's room to be selfish in life. You need to take risks if you want to grow, and you need to care about yourself when no one else does. This site isn't so risky aside from the time investment, but even then I'm glad I wrote it. I feel like it's real proof that I exist, seperate from likes and follows and shit on social media. I'd like to eke out space for it a little more. My right to exist I mean.