An Overthinkers Opulence
I was reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules to Life a few months ago and the one rule that stood out to me the most was “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.” When I read the book at the time, I thought yes that is a good rule but it doesn’t apply to my life. So I shrugged it off and kept it in the back of my mind. I have always been hard on myself, but over the past 2 months, I have been ruthless on my mind. I have these thoughts that “I am not doing enough.”, “Why are you acting so lazy?”, “You are not going to amount to anything if you succumb to these temptations.”. These thoughts have been stoked by social media. It is nearly impossible to not compare yourself to people on social. I know it is not healthy, yet I still do it. I think it is natural to want more out of life, but to the degree of denigrating yourself because I haven’t achieved what these young 20-something-year-olds have. That is just absurd, it is realistically insecurity if anything. Maybe it was the catalyst for my journey of personal growth. There is always more to do. Yet, I have realized there is a problem with personal growth. Personal growth makes you believe that you are an article that is unfinished and you can’t start enjoying life yet. That combined with the fact my mind doesn’t stop thinking, I am always questioning whether or not that was the right choice. Should I have asked for this girl’s number? Should I have talked to this person? Should I have made this move? Why am I feeling this way? You get the picture I am trying to paint, my mind is always in 6th gear. I would constantly berate myself and I finally realized it was not sustainable. I have been trying to look inside my mind and understand when to keep myself accountable versus being my harshest critic.
At what point would talking to yourself with this much malice be considered emotional abuse? If I treated my friends the way I treat myself, I would be paying a therapist mountains of coin. As a self-diagnosed overthinker, I analyze every move and I think it has sparked diffidence in my life. I think I have created a facade that I don’t care what people think. Not caring what people think is a tall order, and I believe I have gotten better at it. This sort of artillery fire happened today. I was sitting at a kava bar and one of the bartenders that I know was reviewing my astrology signs. Even though I do not believe in it, she had a few friends that are my sign. To me, it seemed like she was talking about them with a negative connotation. It just got to me and knocked my self-confidence down for the day. Consequently, I am immortalizing it in a piece of writing. Which will probably make me think about it more, but it made me really want to do some self-reflection. So that is all to say that those thoughts still come into my head but I am trying to contain them and filter them. Until recently I have never really had a lot of self-confidence, really only in the last month have I started to believe in myself. The major thing that changed in my life was that I met a guy named Tommy. He has helped me self-believe. I am truly grateful, he has shown me that I have skills inside myself. All I needed to do was apply, he believed in me and really was quite touching to my soul. It is quite funny because I was talking to him recently and he has been having some trouble in his life and I was just talking to him about it. I was giving him advice on self-belief and we both collectively said “We should just follow our own advice. All our self-doubt issues will be solved.”. I bring this up to say that more often times than not, we know inside of us. Giving myself grace has to be at the forefront of my mind. Yesterday, I went out with a few friends of mine and I woke up at 12 PM the next day. Typically when I wake up really late, I get pissed with myself that I am not doing what I am supposed to. I have been getting better at giving myself grace and when I did wake up that morning, I wasn’t pissed at myself. I was truly happy to stay up until 4 AM and break the routine.
We just don’t seem to take our own advice, especially those who are blessed with overthinking. Odd that I say blessed with overthinking, because if you had asked me that a few months ago I would have that this was a curse. I am slowly starting to realize that it is a true gift or an omen if you will. The reason it is a gift is that because my mind works faster than the average person and I can create more thoughts. I can plan and think through a lot more scenarios. It gives me creative problem-solving for scenarios that will potentially happen. The true challenge that I need to solve is the Thought to Coherence pipeline. That is one of the main reasons I started to write these articles because I want my thoughts to become more coherent. I want to be able to formulate sentences, arguments, and paragraphs a lot faster. My brain has the RAM to process the thoughts, but the system has bugs when it comes to formulation. Bugs can be solved, there is no way to upgrade the RAM of your mind. The goal is to find calm in the tempest of my mind. This journey is a long one but I am excited to tame it.