Experiencing Myself

Potentially Part One

I’m sat on a lunch time train to spend a night in Llandudno as I write this. I think it’s important to set the scene because it helps to highlight how utterly ridiculous I am.

I’m on my way to spend twenty four hours by the sea, watching the coast open up around me and feeling the edible I took with lunch start to soften my intensity.

That’s when my brain thought “I wonder why I’ve always found it so difficult to experience myself”.

Honestly, I know.

I am fucking exhausting.

It highlights one of the core truths about the way I experience the world though.

Underneath the overwhelm, the intensity, the humour that is definitely not a defence mechanism and you can fuck off…

I’m absolutely fixated on understanding myself.

Not passively, at an almost atomic level.

I need to know how all of this works.

That’s why, at the exact moment my brain quietened down a little and I thought I might be about to experience one of these ‘good times’ people talk of. I instinctively reflected “Why is this so hard sometimes?”.

Which, when you read the opening to this post, isn’t a particularly difficult question to answer is it.

Absolute intensity of thought. Always.

Experiencing the moment and observing it at the same time. Never fully present in the now because half of me is always asking “but what does it all mean”.

I bet the edible makes sense now.

Ironically, I actually planned this trip really intentionally. Every decision was about setting the best possible conditions for me to just fucking relax for twenty four hours.

I am ninety-nine percent certain there will be a moment where I feel myself drop and think “this is nice”.

I can almost smell it creeping up on me.

So of course, my next thought was always going to be “why doesn’t feel like this more often”.

Which is a can of worms I seem to have lost the lid for.

I don’t think this obsession with understanding myself came out of nowhere. I think it’s the result of spending years overwhelmed by the speed of the noise in my head whilst constantly questioning if I could hear anything at all.

Eternally watching myself in the moment and asking “am I experiencing this the way a normal person should experience it”.

Even now, as my train approaches Rhyl, there’s an element of me watching myself and asking “am I enjoying this enough?”.

(Side note, yes I am, thank you lunchtime sweety)

It’s taken me a long time to trust myself enough to ask “What do I want”.

This week, that turned out to be 24 hours by the sea.

As I approach my destination, I’m aware of how unbearable I can be.

A trip to relax and my first thought was “let’s figure myself out on the way”.

But I’ve put the right conditions in place.

Time to inhabit life for a little bit.

See you on the train home.

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