The twenty-seventh note
and other thoughts about overthinking.
I got an MRI a couple days ago. I lay on the white alien machine and thought of Tony Soprano. That was my first thought. Mr Tony fucking Soprano. Immediately after I feared I might explode because I’d forgotten to take off my necklaces. I wondered if I’d have to repeat the test again. I couldn’t decide if I should’ve told the nurse to restart it, if I should’ve pressed the button on my right hand to let him know I was about to die via magnetic fields.
I didn’t.
Die I mean.
The thundering noise the machine did and the brightness it expelled felt strangely comforting and 100% daunting. I liked it in there as well as feared it. I feared dying but reasoned that it’d bring me closer to feeling something new, being somewhere new. Like the MRI machine was the subway to heaven. Like I’d get to heaven in my underwear and a hospital gown and nothing else, wondering if I’d get all my answers answered, if the key to full control would at last be handed to me. After all, I deserved nothing more if I were to die right then, this summer. This year I definitely deserved an explanation. “What was going on?!” I’d yell and swear at the bearded dude at the gates, wanting an answer as to what was happening to me this year. But I’d probably come to find a beautiful woman who’d cover me in palo santo and say I needed to find myself before anything else, hug me, and send me on my way, again, alone. She’d whisper, “Eat Pray Love” my love. Remind me to stop thinking and start doing *something* else.
I overthink a lot- about everything it seems. I say it seems because I’ve only recently realized I overthink a lot. 27 years later one would think they’d realize they think too hard, too much, too many- but not until my therapist said “well, you know, you think about things a lot” I realized she meant I was an over thinker.
Dwelling isn’t part of it. It’s not that I beat myself over and over about things I could’ve done better or things I shouldn’t have done. It’s more a quest to find answers that I am aware I will never get - or hiding my worry about my constant need to figure out the future. Finding a reasoning behind *life* only hands the idea of control this control-freak needs. No one told me how hard it was going to be to not have the answer to everything. No one told me how hard it would be to not hear from friends I thought were friends. No one told me I’d be here this summer. And no one told me I wouldn’t have the power at all times to shape the future how I wanted- I’ve always believed the opposite. Maybe one can shape it but can’t control it. That’s a better way of understanding it.
It’s the end of July and I’m in Madrid feeling empty. Like a ghost running from the heat. Half dead as I melt on the asphalt, hooked to my computer screen. Watching stories, feeling fomo, missing New York, missing the feeling of not caring. The rollercoaster is back. There’s this limbo in between happy and sad, in between missing and not, that I ride like there’s no tomorrow. I float in this grey space, stuck in the MRI machine. I look at my phone in search of meaning from astrology apps that I am pretty sure listen to my daily conversations. I stare at my editing, finding the beat I’m missing. Looking at the words I’ve spelt wrong. Turn on Netflix, and repeat. And as the cycle starts again, the instinct to understand when I should be hitting certain marks devours me- I don’t know when I should be feeling this or that, whatever this or that means, a blank statement for many things. I don’t know when I’ll decide where I want to live. I don’t know when I’ll be able to write exactly what I want without freaking out a handful of people. I don’t know much about the future, and that anxiety creeps in like the praying mantis I accidentally killed the other day.
Last year I wrote about Taylor Swift and romance, this year I go back To the One, remember I had Exile on repeat. I guess it should’ve been a sign. Like when I read last week a note I wrote two years ago that had the same feelings we had two months ago. I say we instead of you, because I guess my reaction was the same. To the things you said. A sign that the happiness I though existed was probably not exactly what I thought, heat waves faking me out. I cling on to songs like its iced water on a scorching day.
It is hard to trust that signs are signs. It is hard to not feel like a teenager back home. It is hard to not say fuck you all and move across the ocean, to the end of the world. Because doing that would mean not caring about what x and y think. Doing that would mean truly going with instinct and giving into impulse, something I don’t excel at but I am trying to improve. Because doing that somehow feels like giving up, though I know, truly, it isn’t like so.
So maybe I should buy more flights in random places instead of looking at sublets in New York. The storage unit that has my bed, my books, my clothes could keep waiting for another year. Another month. However long. The marks I’m supposed to hit could change. The thoughts I can overthink can morph.
And so the ride is now going up the roller-coaster. We’re going up. The air is cooling down. The beginning ends now.
I’ll see you next week. Tell me how you are - I hope you’re well. I think of everyone who reads me. But most of all,
I thank you for reading me.
Have a great week!
Chloé
It's always a comforting feeling seeing someone write out the same words and worries that jump around my head too
Lo leí hasta el final, la sensación de estar pensando y pensando de más las cosas es abrumadora pero tal vez es la única forma de sobrellevar los malos momentos o quizás no, quien sabe.