Do you ever have times when you feel you have so much to say but have no idea how to put it into words? Times when you can feel a tornado of truth swirling around in your head and you are desperate to give it life and meaning, then you remember there’s a limit to how much authenticity the world wants to receive, so you keep it to yourself? Authenticity may be a buzz word, but it still has boundaries. Somehow, Glennon Doyle was able to bypass these social safety nets, but she had a lot of way harder shit going on than I do.
There are two options in this situation, really. Let it out and presumably suffer the consequences or stuff it back down where you found it. The latter is certainly the more popular route, though it tends to necessitate chasers and stoppers to prevent whatever you’re denying from coming back to haunt you. In my case, peanut butter serves this purpose well.
I sometimes think of this as the curse of rumination. Apparently there are support groups for people like me. Something along the lines of overthinkers anonymous, with the aim of treating this cyclical gong show just like any other addiction. I am addicted to depth, processing, awareness, theorizing. But where does it get me other than deeper into a hole with no answers, especially since I don’t even know what the questions are.
I read something recently about how you can’t think your way out of a problem. You can think your way towards an idea or a potential solution, but the thinking in and of itself isn’t what’s going to save the day. You have to actually DO something tangible to make progress. You have to stop thinking and start acting.
I feel like this was more for the purposes of people interested in launching a company or quitting their job to find their passion. A gentler way of suggesting that, at some point dear, you have to shit or get off the pot. It was probably not meant for people who just like to think.
Ah! I think I just figured something out. See? I’m proving the theory wrong already. This might all be about house clutter. I go through phases where it doesn't bother me and phases (like now) when it feels like it’s suffocating and all consuming, when all the things that don’t have a home take on a life as directionless synapses in my brain. All the decisions that have to be made about what stays and what goes, where to put things that stay, where to take things that go, darting around like pinballs on a complicated trip to the gutter.
So it isn’t the thoughts I need to either release or stuff back down, it’s all the crap I took out of the storage room that’s been living in plain sight for the past month. It’s all the Lego I took our from under the kids’ beds that’s been lying on the hallway floor since the Christmas break.
I swore I wasn’t going to put any of this stuff back until I had dealt with it, but it might be coming to that point. We’ve made some progress. I’ve tried to kijiji some things. I may just have to accept that, for the sake of my limited sanity, I just have to put what’s left back into the storage room and take the rest to a donation centre, potential profits be damned. Besides, if this goes on any longer, any money we could make would just be destined to pay for therapy. And peanut butter.