Introspection

Introspection.
April 2000.

People have always commented on the fact I have a tendency to think too much. Not about important issues, but just to think. On and on about nothing in particular. What’s so harmful in thinking? I guess their point is that when a person begins to think, I mean really think, they become something different to what they were before. Sometimes the change is just inward, but occasionally it shows through on the outside too.

The ability to change oneself through the power of thought is something that has always held me intrigued because it is an enviable situation to be in. I find it truly fascinating that thoughts can have such a magnitude of power of a person and the way they perceive things. Personally, I believe it is possible to achieve a certain state of mind in which you can live primarily by yourself, and every once in a while, I retreat to this place to escape the factors of living life as a responsible adult in the twenty-first century. I guess it could be heralded as a deliberate variation of meditation and self-absorbedness.

It takes me a while, a certain type of mood to create the disposition in which I am safe to do what I want. More importantly, I am able to feel what I want. It doesn’t happen outside of my bedroom, because that is the only place where I am able to feel safe. I am safe from intrusion and interruption and the mean monsters that live and walk around on the other side of that door, pretending to be my friends, my family, my life.

I simply lie down and stare at my picture decorated walls and the sticky, glow in the dark stars on my ceiling and think. I think until I begin to think I am thinking too much. You go past the state of sleepiness and exhaustion and irritability and are confronted with your subconscious with your eyes open and your heart exposed. The mind takes over where the body had resisted. Thoughts. Thoughts from years, days, months ago seep through as you relive them all, making each one right inside your head so you can move on with reality when you are ready to face it once again. Somehow if I can make things right up there, then real life will be alright too.

The thoughts swim around uncontrollably until they become as sorted and dealt with as they ever will be. Then, comes the emptiness and you realize, in your warped state, that you are sobbing in silence and your blotchy face has black mascara meandering its way through your featureless expression. Everything blurs and burns for an uncountable length of time. From then on it becomes hard to describe. Not sadness or desperation or a sense of calm… I’m just here.

There is no word I know of to relay to you what it is that I feel. I lay wet, sticky and still. Aching. Staring. No thoughts, no emotions, no movement, no nothing. Drained of the things that keep you back, but keep you alive. A weight is lifted as the struggle to hold onto the past becomes less relevant. Time and space and motion return to their normal states. And slowly but surely, life returns and reality kicks in with the sound of my brother’s TV on too loud in the adjacent room and my sister’s stereo pounding through the walls. Mum yells at me to do the washing up and sighing, I am forced to carry on with daily life as I know it, until I retreat again to the world only I know.