I wanted to revisit some items I touched on in the last post in more detail.

Thoughts

“Children, sometimes I think all our thoughts are just things and then sometimes think things are just thoughts.”

– “Elephant in the Dock” by mewithoutYou

I have had an unhealthy relationship with my mind and my thoughts for most of my life. I always understood that I thought too much but I never knew why it happened and I had no solution for the problem. Here is a list of beliefs I have had about thoughts:

• My thoughts come from me.
• My thoughts are true.
• Overthinking is a trait and therefore can’t be changed. 
• My thoughts and my mind are who I am, or at least part of who I am.

More recently I have found it helpful to think of thoughts as a sense object, like a sight or a sound, that I experience coming from the mind. Each thought is as real to my experience as a sound is. However, other people can’t experience the thoughts currently occurring in my mind. I now think the following list is more accurate:

• Thoughts happen without my effort.
• I experience thoughts but the contents of the thoughts are not true.
• Overthinking is a habit and can be changed.
• I experience thoughts and mind but neither are a part of who I am.

Identity

“I do not exist, but faithfully insist…  there’s a necessary dying, like the horseshoe crab in its proper seasons sheds its shell”

– “Messes of Men” by mewithoutYou

I am specifically wary of believing thoughts containing the word “I”. I used to believe a lot of thoughts telling me who I was, whether positive or negative. I am smart. I am melancholic. I am a bad person.

I unconsciously identified with a persona, a public-facing fake personality, based on these thoughts. While having a persona isn’t bad, believing I was this persona caused a fair number of problems. A persona is static, allowing no room for growth. A persona is also easily swayed by outer events and opinions. The appeal was that I no longer had to feel because I was responding to life solely with my mind. 

Example: I tell myself I am a person who hates country music. I am in public and hear a country song. I recognize the sound as a country song and I react with disgust. 

What happens when I no longer want a random song playing in public to trigger my disgust? Though I can’t change who I am, I can ask myself if who I say I am is really me. 

Here is a short list of things a person might identify with that aren’t really them: thoughts, emotions (e.g. “I am an anxious person”), age/physical appearance, relationships, profession, political party, religious affiliation, and nationality.

Mental Images

“Such distance from our friends, like a scratch across a lens, made everything look wrong from anywhere we stood”

– “Messes of Men” by mewithoutYou

Similar to a persona, my mind can also create mental images of other people. For the same reasons the persona is false, these images are false. My mental images are biased, static, and based on incomplete and outdated information. Even someone I know well has experienced things I don’t know about and have had experiences since the last time I saw them. Maybe they haven’t completely changed, there’s still some continuity there, but they’re not the exact same person. 

Example: I got into an argument with someone yesterday. I’m still mad now even though the conversation is over. 

Who am I actually mad at? I’m not even with them right now. I am therefore getting angry at my opinion of who they were yesterday. I am mad at a thought based on outdated information. 

Though I fail a lot, I am getting better at being present, experiencing people as they are in the moment instead of who my mind said they were yesterday, last week, or last year. Just as I owe it to myself to stop putting myself in a box, I owe the same to everyone else.

Time

“It wasn’t an end, it wasn’t a beginning, but a ceaseless stumbling on”

– “Nice and Blue (Pt. 2)” by mewithoutYou

The last thing I wanted to say is that everything changes in time. Who we are will change and the same is true for everyone and everything else we know. Everything is unfolding in front of us all the time, and I think it’s good practice not to arrive at conclusions before the end of the story.