Confessions of a Thoughtaholic: Part 1

Restless the mind is. . .
Truly I think
The wind is no wilder.
Bhagavad Gita

My name is Mike and I’m a recovering thoughtaholic. I can’t say that I’m completely clean because I have still have thoughts now and then. I can say that they no longer run my life. My story is like that of many thinking addicts. I only hope it will help some other desperate soul out there in search of his or her next brain fix.

I began my addiction very early in life. It seemed very innocent at the time. I don’t remember the exact thoughts I had but I know they had something to do with a teddy bear, a blankie and some kind of cage I was living in at the time. I often used thoughts to soothe my young jangled nerves. This seemed a necessity once the “tall ones” took away my pacifier.

I as grew older, I found the hidden powers of thinking. It seemed to me that when I thought about scary stuff, I got scared and when I thought about happy stuff, I felt happy. I would often use thinking to create magical worlds where I could zoom into space, drive racecars, hunt for buried treasures and battle evil monsters all without leaving the safety of my bedroom.

Unbelievably, I was soon sent away to learn to think even more. Part of my brain seemed to know better and fought against this indoctrination. To my frustrated parents, this seemed like a classic case of separation anxiety; to me it was being cast out of Eden, crayons, paste and scissors in tow.

As I got the hang of formal education, my thinking addiction was well under way. I soon moved on from the soft stuff, “See Jane Run,” to the hard stuff, “If x=10 and y=x-5 what is 5x + 10y?” These were good times. There was nothing that my mind could not do. Jacked up on thoughts, I could solve the deepest of life’s mysteries. I was about to take a big bite out of the apple of knowledge.

Such is the exuberance and ignorance of youth, however, and I soon discovered that my thinking did not always bring good feelings. Sometimes, I would find my thoughts simply revolving around each other with no apparent purpose. Other times, my thoughts would lead to negative consequences that seemed to be delivered by an uncaring world. As I moved into early adulthood, my thinking habit was a daily happening and there were times when I would find myself, alone in bed, tossing and turning from the thoughts that wanted me to pull an all-nighter.

They say that recovery starts once you hit bottom. For me that bottom was in the form of an anxiety episode that took place well into my adult years. At the time, I believed I had tamed the thought beast and had kicked the habit. Sure, I was still thinking on a daily basis and trying to cover up the negative effects of thinking by more thinking. Of course, I was still hiding my thinking on occasions and, in the classic addict move, I was seeking out other thinkers, but I was still in control. That delusion painfully dissolved when the evil thoughts moved in and pushed out anything good and pure.

To be continued . . .