This is one reason why I have a girlfriend. Having to think about someone else helps to distract thinking all about me.
I do this as well. Sometimes I wake up around 12-2AM and an hour later I’m still just laying there thinking so I put on the TV and turn the sound down low and close my eyes and just listen and focus on that and it helps me fall back to sleep.
I use it to scare other people.
“You just have to hear the things that come out of my mouth. Do you really want to know all the things that just stay in my head?”
So true. And I have all the same interests as me.
This works for me sometimes. But my ADD can get bad when I’m tired and I can’t even focus on the TV. I’ll end up flipping channels and never get anywhere.
Sex has an equal chance of waking me up and putting me to sleep. So I always opt for the sex.
My dad drank alcohol to try and escape his memories , it only brought out the worst in him . I would use yoga to try and escape my dad’s anger or walk to the beach and watch and listen to the ocean for hours by myself when I was a teenager.
I believe we can escape and I also believe that to some extent we can reinvent ourselves. After my divorce I felt a pain in my stomach like I had never experienced before I was obsessed with thinking about it almost non stop. I did this for almost 3 months and one day just made the decision to start feeling better and let it go. Once I made the decision it got better very quickly. I also started making changes in my life and to a large extent recreated who I was.
And we always hang out at the same places. I kind of like hanging with me.
A wise man once said this to Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Bob McClane: What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken?
Douglas Quaid: I give up.
Bob McClane: You! You’re the same. No matter where you go, there you are. It’s always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. I-I know it sounds wild. It is the latest thing in travel. We call it the Ego Trip.
Taking a break from yourself is a goal of many meditative practices. And yes it can be hard to do it in the moment, but it is possible to escape yourself. It is also possible to shift one’s perspective, making the situation positive. Again not always easy but doable with practice.
I know the grass is always greener and all that but I was once very fragmented and would bug out of the body/mind with very little provocation leaving some other poor fragment of a personality to take the heat. Years and years of psychiatry created me and laid me over the top of the system. I would like it to be quieter in the head but life is much easier when there is one person at the wheel, even with a clown car full of panicked back seat drivers.
Interestingly I am banned from meditation and also hypnosis in case I get lost.
I do. It’s not what you think.
Well you think you’re gonna find yourself a little piece of paradise.
But it ain’t happened yet so girl, you better think twice.
Don’t you see no matter what you do, you’ll never run away from you.
And if you keep on runnin’, you’ll have to pay the price.
Yeah, generally speaking I like me too. There are times when I’ve wished more than anything that things were different and *circumstances *could be escaped, but not too often when I wished I could escape myself.
I can’t relate. I’m such an amazingly pleasant human being that even in my darkest hour I wouldn’t want to be rid of me. Noble creature am I, I pity all of you for not being me. No ego.
Justo a mí me tocó ser yo :(… I had to go and be me.
I generally like me, now that I’ve finally accepted there’s nothing wrong with being the same basic shape as hundreds of thousands of other women; like many middle aged women, if I’d been as comfortable with my body in my teens or twenties as I am now, I would have killed on the social stage instead of spending so much time imitating a wall sconce. Or, well, at least I would have danced more; I imagine I would still have been shit at the romance parts.
But the negative cycles? Oh yes, I know those. It is shit to get them, but in my case it is good that now when I get them it’s a sign that something is very fucked up right now and not the default like it used to be!
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me at least, it’s not always the same old me. I’m not even the same me as I was a couple years ago, in very distinct and identifiable ways. If I could get a bunch of past me’s together in a room for a trans-time bull session, we’d have a lot to say to each other, because while we would obviously share a great deal in the way of history, attributes, and interests, we wouldn’t be just multiple copies of the same person.
Like Dylan said, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” Well, parts of you are dying off all the time even if you’re busy being born, if only in order to give you room to become something new. You’ve got to keep being born just to keep from getting smaller.
Dylan again (same song, different verse):
*And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only *
Yeah, and they are just about the worst choices to make.
But have you been undressed by kings and seen some things that a woman ain’t s’posed to see?
The thing to do is meditation. I’m not saying I always do this; in fact I’m more likely to reach for a bottle of rum. But that creates its own problems.
Meditate. Don’t try to clear your mind. Let all these fucked up thoughts flood into your brain. Shine a light on them, tag them, categorize them, index them, capture them in a mugshot. Don’t try to purge them. Just identify them. You will find they retreat like roaches from a bright light. When you get skilled at this, you will see that all these thoughts scamper away from the threat of contemplation, leaving behind a ‘you’ that is worth spending time with, worth nurturing and protecting, and that it is satisfying to be.