Hi there. I don’t know what you expected.
I could describe myself using many different applicable labels, but I usually find that thinkingtoomuch™ is still very apt.
For as long as I can remember, people outside my family have frequently told me that I was “thinking/worrying too much” or as a comment to various inquisitive observations of mine, concluded that I was “(just) overthinking [object] (again)” or “making things too complicated”. My interests, thoughts and worries rarely fell on common ground with my peers, a consistent and repetitive experience which goes back as far as my preschool life. They were concerned with playground politics while I was trying to get adults to explain to me why human beings were still fighting actual wars despite them having had to learn in school that it was a very bad thing which never benefits any human being. They were concerned with celebrity gossip while I was silently desperate about the destruction of rain forests, exploitation of third world countries and lobbies and bribes in politics. They were concerned with their first kiss while I was wondering how they could call someone their best friend yet still talk about them behind their back as soon as they left the room. And why said friend would even defend the shit-talker when I openly spoke up and asked them why they did it.
By now I am just barely old, and wise, and diagnosed enough to understand that. As a kid I could not yet understand why I found it hard to relate to most of my peers and vice versa, although I really wanted to belong. There was no discernible pattern as to why it didn’t work out, so I started wondering whether something was wrong with me. I realized after some time that some of the others apparently judged my non-compliance to do as they did, or to think as they did, or to feel as they did, as unwillingness on my part, instead of inability. And even though we all tried, we didn’t speak the same language, and we just didn’t “get” each other.
I believe that my social feedback and subsequent insight provoked my interest in everything concerning human beings with regards to their experiences, thoughts, behavior and their interactions. I remember complaining to my mother how I felt like everyone else had read a book on how to be a human being except for me. When I was 13, I decided that since I didn’t know where to find that book, I apparently needed to write it myself. Social interaction with people of my peer group became a code I needed to crack. So that in learning, choosing and reproducing the right patterns, I would surely be able to be understood better and build my place within my social environment. My first attempts failed spectacularly, of course. Turns out that in order to get to the sweet spot, I needed to pass the uncanny valley of social interaction – which is where I got stuck for some time. The further I got, the more it dawned on me that in order to make it to the other side, I had to almost completely deny myself. As I grew older, I learned that some of us actually go the distance. I personally gave up on that whole teenage socializing experience for a few more years, which were increasingly lonely.
In hindsight I find it somewhat entertaining that I actually tried to use all the skills which alienated me socially to adapt my behavior in order fit in. I eventually managed to train myself to a point where I could easily blend into any new social context but found myself increasingly frustrated and aware of the futility of it all. Having to simultaneously operate outside the box to completely fit into it is an impossible endeavor in our given three dimensions. I turned into a half-baked social chameleon that secretly longed for intense bonds and finding others just like me. As in any good story, the answer is boringly simple yet dauntingly sisyphean. Self-acceptance. Whenever I stopped trying to bond over carefully selected parts of me and started accepting who I truly am, I made friends. The right kind of friends.
I’m now in my early thirties, still overthinking, still trying to find my place in this world. Too young to already settle and too old to still be roaming. So, all in all, I thought that this blog might be a possibility for me to put my thoughts out there and maybe for like-minded individuals to find themselves within them, and maybe, feel a little less lonely and get a little closer to themselves.
Be you.