Fahckmylife's Blog
Crap adult, OK human.

Yeah.  I was pretty happy with my hair and eyelashes that day.

OK this might not make any sense to anybody but me.  It’s a bit abstract and vague and I am (hold onto your hats) talking about ‘feelings’ but this is something that I would actually like to talk about, with people, in real life, for realises.

Do you ever get those feelings that won’t go away?  Like an unfinished sentence or a rhetorical question that just keeps repeating over and over in your head?  Sometimes I do and it drives me insane.  I like to call this cyclical thinking – where you ask yourself a series of related questions that cannot be answered.  The series of questions expands and contracts, but this doesn’t improve the situation.  It makes you nervous, possibly because you are trying to predict some kind of possible outcome, or to get to the bottom of how you or others actually realistically perceive yourself or a certain situation.  Is it because these situations are out of your control and that you feel helpless that you torment yourself at 4am trying to work out answers to things that haven’t even happened yet? 

I’ll never know.  I’ve talked to a few people about this ‘cyclical thinking’ jazz and we’ve not come to any solid conclusions.  Say for example, just to give you a vague idea of what I mean, you start to think you can predict things (not in a mental way, just that you are nearly sure of the outcome of something) and you then explore many of the possibilities of what can happen from said situation.  Each capillary of thought that you explore, no matter how different, ends up leading you down another road that you cannot even fathom the end of but still you are positive that you will end up in the same final position.  In my case, the end point of my ruminations is always negative.  So then I start again, and explore a different route, and before I know it it’s 4.30 in the morning and I’ve smoked 20 cigarettes and watched 3 hours of porn for background noise without even noticing.

I know it probably doesn’t look like or even seem like it and I have no basis of comparison but my thoughts move really fast constantly.  They very rarely stop. Sometimes I go really really quiet.  This does not mean that my brain has stopped.  It means my brain is thinking so much that I can’t filter out anything coherent.   I mean have it under control but these cyclical thoughts are just annoying more than anything.  I have found that I can stop them by focusing on how pointless they are.   The bad part of this is that I have had to force a lot of things down inside, instead of just letting them go.  I am aware of what I do, I continue to do it but see it for what it is, but act like it’s not there.  So yeah, I have feelings other than anger and drunk (because that’s an emotion) but don’t expect to ever really have a serious conversation with me about how I feel about things out loud that will make me feel like I’m exposing myself (not my tits, obviously). Like I can talk about things in a very clinical way but not about the ‘feels’.   Seriously, try it and even if I’m drunk I’ll turn it into a joke, distract you or I’ll completely clam up.  No really, don’t.  That was a shit joke.  All of the above will happen and I can’t deal with that.

So anyway, the point of this was to find out how you dealt with this stupid cyclical thinking thing if you experience it?  Obviously, it takes different forms, from telling yourself over and over that you’re a sap to nearly clawing your face off waiting to hear about a job interview or even just trying to guess where you will be in five years.  Do you get tired from being stuck in conversational cul-de-sacs in your head?  I’m genuinely just interested.  If there is another way to get over it without slowly turning yourself into someone with the emotional retardation.  This annoys me in particular because I’m quite self aware and know where most of my motivations and actions come from (I can’t always change them but that’s OK with me once I know why I do what I do) but I have no clue about this at all.  Where does it come from?  Why do you feel stuck in this line of thinking?

Language gave us the ability to voice our discontent.  Obviously the ability to speak and communicate is fantastic but self awareness and the by-products of it, such as ‘cyclical thinking’ suck balls.  Imagine if we couldn’t talk to ourselves how much easier it would be.  We wouldn’t be as clever but we wouldn’t be as unhappy or able to recognise unhappiness.