Overthinking

I always struggle getting my thoughts on paper. I am the biggest overthinker you will ever meet. I rethink every statement, word, phrase, punctuation. I just backspaced this 3 times before settling on the one you see now. I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist but one thing I would say is I hate making mistakes.

 

I remember taking exams in high school and thinking about all the answers I could have possibly gotten wrong. Don’t get me started on the group of kids in the corner who want to compare answers. They always nag about how they got this, or they got that, and it would constantly cause my brain to implode on itself. I was already second guessing what I got I didn’t need any more confused thoughts adding on to my paranoid brain. I have tried shedding that trait, but I rather ended up perfecting the art of overthinking when I came to the UofA. A new skill I developed through overthinking is correctly predicting my exam scores by overthinking the questions and resolving them after the exam. I have managed to correctly predict 90% of my college exam scores. I know it sounds crazy but for some weird reason my brain just can’t help it. 

 

The worst thing my overthinking self cannot handle is texts. The most common form of communication in this era leaves me with migraines. I always half swipe snaps and preview texts in order to come up with replies. The thought of being misunderstood or coming across as harsh, always prevents me from giving instant replies. Recently, I decided to break this habit and just type without dwelling on my reply.  The good thing about that is I now give instant replies, but (there is always a but) I end up overthinking about my reply after typing it. I just shifted the overthinking phase to after the reply instead of before the reply. 

 

I am worse than a yelp reviewer in regard to shopping. I check YouTube videos to find the best of that specific product. Then I read a lot of reviews to decide whether or not the product is worth purchasing. It sounds like I complete this in 20 minutes, but I actually take weeks to narrow down my choices. 

 

My brain is constantly a war zone, a battle between yes or no’s, buying or not buying, texting or ignoring, shooting my shot or staying silent. I know it prevents me from living in the moment and I’m working on it. It is not going to be easy to unlearn overthinking but I’m ready because after all You Only Live Once. 

 

*Sorry if my blog was confusing and all over the place. This was my attempt at not overthinking what I write. Although it felt freeing, I can already feel my brain trying to rewrite this blog so I am just going to go ahead and click publish.