Just Go With The Flow

[trickykitty]

"Just relax."
"You're over-thinking it."
"Stop analyzing things so much."
"Just go with the flow."

These words have been so commonly said to me throughout my lifetime, and yet they are almost as foreign to me today as they were when I was 5. This is not the same thing as "holding on to old grudges." That takes effort. Over-thinking things takes almost negligible effort on my part, and in many cases, it's enjoyable. I reap an amazing sense of joy out of uncovering things, understanding things, making sense out of things, and finding the patterns in things. The process of putting together the pieces of the puzzle and turning it into a full, complete, whole picture is the definition of exhilaration for me.

This holds true for anything and everything in my world. It's not just puzzles and games. It's all the little nuances of life. All the situations and emotions that fall within my reach have to be tortured by my mental paper shredder before I start painstakingly putting all the slivers back together again in a sorted order.

If putting together the pieces to form the whole is exhilaration, long-lasting puzzles that I just can't quite figure out and understand is pure torment. To be forced to stare at all the little pieces for so long and yet not be able to figure them out, nor just put them in a box, throw them away, and "move on" as others so casually suggest, is like suffering a life of misery and persecution simply because of how I think. I will tell someone else that it's not that simple, and they will say, Why yes, yes it is. So I find the middle ground, and I try to explain that I concede that it could be that easy if my brain were wired like theirs, but mine isn't, which means it's possible, but absolutely nowhere near simple.

"Let bygones be bygones."

This is replaced in my mind with, "Let's understand this so that it doesn't happen again."

I've never really been a person to simply feel through a situation on an emotional level. It's well known among people that know me that I have to work things out in my mind. I'm trying to understand the value in "going with the flow," and thus I'm working to adapt. I have to phrase it that way, because I don't think I can change my way of thinking. The most I can do is try to implement a new tool that will make others around me freak out less by my actions. When I try to work things out aloud I run into all sorts of terrible walls and land mines set up by other people around me. They don't want to over-think things. They don't want to look at the nitty-gritty details. I feel sorry for them that they don't, but on the flip side, they feel sorry that I do. It's like putting together a model plane or car, or putting together a detailed puzzle while having to really analyze each piece. Hitting a point of never-ending cognitive dissonance is for all intents and purposes PAINFUL to me, but having it ultimately resolve into understanding is an amazing feeling that never gets felt if one simply "goes with the flow" all the time.

Comments

[jdack]

I always remember a line from this memoir a blogger I read wrote, from when he was starting at a rehab facility for heroin addiction.

Counselor: "Do you ever stop thinking?"
Him: "No, and I don't like it when people fucking ask me to."