Its the friend of every awkward situation that leaves you pondering about the many things you should have said or maybe shouldn't have said. It's you every time selfloathing takes over and gets you to remember every shameful situation you've gone through since kinder garden as you lay in bed until 3 am staring at the ceiling, while trying to stop your mind from racing so that that you can get the few hours of sleep you've been hoping for all week.
Whatever the reason might be in some instances it almost seems as if it is an involuntary process your mind forces itself to go over just to make sure you didn't miss anything. While everyone around can simply move on with their daily lives, some of us need some extra time, just so that we can take in the experience for everything that it is, while learning everything we can form it. This way we can make a more honest attempt at not committing the same mistakes again.
It is a fascination that might even borderline a psychotic or insane behavior, when all we do is play the same scenarios over and over and over again in our heads. Sometimes we can spend a whole week analyzing one quote or saying we heard on the radio or read somewhere. For me it started when I was little and I was sitting in the passengers sit of my dad's Toyota. We were heading for one of the working sites he had to stock up; it was all dirt roads through the mountains of southern Chile and all my dad would listen to was this talks shows on some background radio. Just a couple of old man drifting off between telling dirty jokes, which I had no idea what they meant, and serious talks. On one of their philosophical conversations one of them read a quote by Jean- Paul Sartre that went like
"Felicidad no es hacer lo que uno quiere, sino querer lo que uno hace"
Which means happiness is not doing what you love, but loving what you do, I cannot express how much this resonated in my head, I wrote the quote on a little notepad that I eventually lost somewhere but the quote has stuck with me ever since. Because every boring class, every person I meet, every idea I hear, and almost every situation I found myself in has the potential to teach me something new and I find a great deal of joy in this, that is what I like doing and I've been trying my hardest to find it in everything I do ever since I heard that radio conversation. It might just be me being an extremely curious individual but is this curiosity for trying to see if I can squeeze something else out of everything that has led to where I'm at. I'm usually told that I make everything more complicated than it actually is, and so far they've been right sometimes. Still, again, if it wasn't for this, sometimes troublesome habit, I wouldn't be who I am today and for all that is worth I don't think I'm doing too poorly in this life/college/adulthood thing.
The main issue for me has been overthinking situations in the moment and trying to grab a hold of something that seems somewhat logical at the time events are unfolding in front of me. I've missed opportunities and disappointed people because of it, and this might just be the only regrets I have in my short life. But if it wasn't for me being this way I don't think I could stare at a sunrise or sunset a different way every time, I wouldn't spend so much time looking at the sky and stars trying to find something that I still don't even know how it looks. If "the answer is blowing in the wind" I don think I'll be able to overthink my way into finding it, but maybe one day when I'm old I'll be able to look back and realize – Hey, that might have been it. But I don't think I'll be ever be sure. I know my heart and brain tend to point in different directions, so as I learn how to control this part of me that has kept me up many nights, I realize how much it can help me find the path where the two biggest forces I have in myself meet and join in a sort of complicated and completely up for interpretation, somewhat stable harmony.
