Like a record, baby
05 June 2011 06:51 AM Categories: Writing prompts
They psychiatrist asked if I had obsessive thoughts. I tend to obsess, I told her, but I thought it was a personality thing. You know, the minute examination of every detail, the post-fight righting of wrongs, the history rewrite, my chance to tell someone what I really think and to imagine them listening, the perfect audience.
In my mind, my imaginary conversational companion is unadulterated by his own problems, totally loving and caring, with a mind free of prejudice and hurt. Recently I realized again that what I am looking for is to exist in someone else’s mind, to be fully formed and real and "me" for someone else, to be their obsession. It doesn’t work that way, of course. There is no perfectly objective (yet deeply loving) mind out there where I can be held gently with understanding and grace. The people I wasted my obsessions on were as broken as I was, maybe more. My strange new clarity of vision shows me that I was a speck of a thought for them, if I was a thought at all.
I’m beginning to feel separate from the rethink and the silent conversation. I still have them – old habits die hard – but they strike me as being more and more ridiculous, a fantasy, some safe way of fulfilling a need to be heard and seen without actually communicating directly.
I finally scored some melatonin yesterday, in liquid form, and took it before bed, hoping that I wouldn’t wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. like I have lately. It worked, or my idea of what it should do worked, and I fairly sprung out of bed at 5:20, full of energy and hope, my mind clear of obsession. Is it the drugs, all of this? The way I can interrupt the thought process, the way my husband and I are communicating differently? Is it the therapy, currently at a rate of 2-3 sessions a week (and I am so tired of me, let me tell you)? Will a few more nights of good sleep make a difference, too? Even without good sleep, I've seen a difference, a return to my old efficiency, the clearing of junk both real and metaphorical.
My worry is that this is all false, that it will go away, that the pills I take are more speed than mood enhancers. The doctor will look at the side effects (insomnia, appetite suppression, the hum of my brain reaching my ears) and take away this pill. Or maybe I’m ascribing too much to it – how could I get lucky on the first try?
As with everything else these days, I have to live with the ambiguity.
From the prompt "Around and around."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit.
And because I'm feeling silly and on my usual 1980s kick, here is a television ad for Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume, circa 1985.
Image by tricky™.
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