the thoughts that think me

i'm not aware of almost anything I am thinking on a daily basis, surely that's not good doc???

Frances Kearnes, five People Thinking the Same Thing

It’s wild how most of the things we think, the little thoughts that scurry through our brains, do so without us ever noticing them.

In a given day I’d say about 95% of what I think and feel goes completely unnoticed by my own awareness.

They just sorta…happen, much like how my heart does it’s beat-beat-beat thing and my tummy does it’s digest-the-food-and-grab-the-nutrients-and-ship-the-rest-to-pooptown thing etc.

Sure, the body is running it’s own show, self-sufficient, etc, but the mind?? The thinking? The feeling? The…soul?

I thought I was in charge of that department. I run the show! I’ve constructed this entire life - my one and only according to Mother Mary Oliver - based on how I think and feel and ride this soulcycle- so…what the fuck?

Just this morning I happened to find myself aware of or, to be more precise, remembering, two thoughts that’d recently run through my mind, laying waste and carnage, only to disappear without ever even filling out the Guest Book to alert me of their presence.

The first thought involved calling my friends. I’d promised myself to do it more since moving away because I want to stay in touch with the people I love. But after a couple weeks of the ol’ two-kid no-sleep new-town maelstrom, I’d stopped calling people. Now, two months into the move, the thought has calcified into “I never call people I suck” which, itself, then makes me not call people.

What is this, the dark ages? Harry Potter? Cuz that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And here’s the kicker, the real piece of the resistahnce (godblessyou) - these wiggle worm thoughts leave little trace in my mind of their presence but they do very much create in me a belief of myself - that I suck and do not call people - which I then move through the world believing to be true.

And that belief makes it all the harder to call people which brings about more stinky thinky thoughts which makes it harder to call people and so on.

Had I not gotten luckier than a leprechaun at a four-leaf clover buffet, I’d be walking around this earth thinking, nay, KNOWING, I sucked at phone calls and thus preventing myself from ever disproving that fact.

The fact that this happens every day without my knowledge is befuddling to say the least. But I’ll say more!

Here’s the second thought I happened to catch scampering its way through my thinkhole this morning.

A month or so ago, we went to visit Lauren’s parents for a trip. I packed a bag, my gym bag, with stuff like my computer charger and a real life physical book I’d bought at the bookstore called The Analog Sea Review. It was self-described as an ‘offline journal’ and I loved it. A series of excerpts from essays, songs, films, etc. all about how to see the world that were not so digital, so frenetic, etc — a few moments from the film My Dinner with Andre followed by an interview with Andre himself, the lyrics to The Sound of Silence, bits of essays like The Year The Decade Exploded by Jon Savage and Missing Persons by Joan Didion. Even a couple pages from Waiting For Godot.

The journal had no online presence, and instead included a little note that read:

So you managed to find us amid all the flickering and noise. Thank you for that, and for supporting your local bookstores and writers. If you discover something valuable in this work, please tell other daydreamers about Analog Sea, our books, our biannual journal, The Analog Sea Review, and our wish for a little slowness now and then.

I’d read the book a little bit during the trip and promptly forgot about it when we came home. Yesterday, I went to the gym (hold your apploz) and lo! behold! there was the book. I took it out of the gym bag so that my fellow get swole bros didn’t think i was a complete nerd. This morning, there was the book, waiting for me, and I thought to myself, “ah I can’t read this I never read books anymore I suck this was a good book and I just am too online and too stupid to sit down with something actually worth reading because I suck and that’s never gonna change.”

All of that, btw, was thunk by me in less than zero seconds. No time at all but there it all was, or there it had been because it was now gone, having left in its wake a curdled belief system that could best be summarized as - “Alex, you are a used up coupon - unredeemable.”

But this is not true! I read the book with my morning cottage cheese+protein+blueberries+muesli and read some more with my mini-second helping of cottage cheese+protein+blueberries+muesli.

(side note why in the hell do they call it muesli?? sounds like mucinex oh thats probably why).

With both thoughts, I was stuck, glued to the floor of my own self-loathing, and - what’s this? - t’was I who did the gluing. But luckily, I’m a cheap-o so I didn’t pay for the fancy gorilla glue. Mine is sticky but very much not permanent like that Elmer’s orange nipple bottle we used in elementary school but, and this is key, it does not feel that way.

It feels like it’s forever true. This is, according to the literature, a ‘fixed mindset.’ I I am the way I am- bad - and can never not be. Oh and have you met my friend shame? He says I’m bad too.

Depressed people love this shit. Aha, they go, proof of my own inadequacy.

But there’s a second mindset. Growth mindset. Babies have it, which is why they get bigger delete this.

Kids often lose it, believing falsely that the endless ways they’re quantified and graded and ranked determine the person that they are.

With growth mindset, my personal friend Carol Dweck says, you interpret what’s happening as nothing but neutral information to shape the person you are becoming. That’s the key - becoming, not became.

Or for my spanish speaking freaks — estar, not ser. I am, but not I AM.

I know meditation can help me hear my own thoughts better blah blah but my cold dark heart has decided that meditation is lame and people who do it are losers. It’s the ‘oh now everyone likes the band I liked before they were cool’ thing, except I didn’t like the band first. People thousands of years ago did. We’re all posers, but at least I’m not as bad as the others.

Yet another false belief!

They’re everywhere, they’re everything, they’re all at once. But we are not stuck believing them.

Do Stop Believin’, the song should go.

I did, twice, and you can too.