I Look Like Shit

A problem I have is that I tend to over-think things. Though I can be shy and might not speak very much sometimes, in my head the wheels are constantly turning and analysing everything I see. It’s not exactly healthy and is something that I would avoid, but unfortunately the way my mind works is not something that I control.

The worst part about over-thinking things is that it leads to several bad habits that I would like to avoid just as much. There really are too many to list but the main one is that I keep things bottled up. The link between over-thinking situations and over-analyzing occurrences and my habit of not letting anything out may seem a little bit strained, but let me elaborate.

There are and were many people who I am and was exposed to on a regular basis that I found to be pretty irritating and overbearing. Usually a big part of this would be making a gigantic deal out of things that were pretty minor in actuality. An example would be complaining about schoolwork and acting like it was the end of the world that they had an exam/essay/report/etc to write and also acting like they specifically had it worse than anyone else. In reality everyone at university had a pretty similar workload if not worse than these people (An engineer would have far more work to finish in any given week than a business major.) but this was lost on them. They would often make similar remarks about their love life and such.

As is my custom, I found this people to be extremely annoying and very unpleasant to be around. Naturally I wanted to be perceived in the opposite light of these people, so I tried to do the opposite of whatever they would. Since they let everything out and constantly complained, I started to not let anything out and try to never whine. This is certainly not healthy or recommended but it does have a few positives that come along with it. If you stop to think about it, do you actually like to hear about others’ problems? The answer is definitely no. While I’m sure you take great pleasure in hearing your friends rant and helping them overcome obstacles that pleasure comes from helping your friends out and seeing them become happy again, not from hearing them complain. Straight up, people complaining fucking sucks. So I found that not venting about little annoyances made it seem like I am far more easy-going than I actually am and thus more likeable.

However, with this approach come many more negatives than positives. As Jeff Rosenstock very poignantly put on his latest album “Show me a person who always seems fine and I’ll show you a lying sack of shit”. Everyone dislikes things and gets low because that is human nature and it happens to everyone and that’s just the way things are. So if you have no avenue to purge these annoyances, they start to pile up and get much worse.

This has been the case lately. I’m done school and don’t really have anything to challenge myself like my program did. I’ve been forced to move back into my parent’s house and live in my sister’s room while she is away at school. I have no job and thus no source of income to do things. My band lives in another city that is an hour and a half away by car, but 3-4 hours away via public transit, which is what I am forced to take to get to practice. All this adds up to me often feeling beaten down and tired, despite not having done very much, which is just about the worst feeling you can get.

I have a select few friends who don’t really mind hearing me open up about things, but on the whole I keep it to myself because I feel like I shouldn’t trouble other people with my problems when they already have their own. As a result of this tendency coupled with my aforementioned worries, I wake up in a bad mood with nowhere for it to really go, which leads to days like today:

I wake up still tired, I put on records about being sad, I drink coffee and mope around my house, keeping quiet and trying to find things to do while my mind races around in circles thinking about the things I don’t like but not really finding a way to reconcile them.

Fortunately for me, my 11 year-old border collie has a habit of noticing when I don’t feel so great and he came over to put his head in my lap, stare at me with his gigantic eyes and remind me that at least he wants me to feel good.