Since 1989 I have been an over thinker. I can run scenarios and have conversations within possible futures with the best of them. I can plot and plan the future but it has always been in defense. I spent a goodly portion of my life not living my life because my thoughts were always tied to what response would be required from me to someone else’s plans. I was a great thinker but to what end? What would have happened if I had expended even a portion of that energy concentrating on my plans, or my goals instead?

All the planning and overthinking was a defense mechanism to severe abuse, not just in my home but also in my workplace(s). There were multiple Machiavellian personalities in my circles. They were my bosses, some were co-workers, and others were in my closest relationships. After years of being in their presence I believed that the only way to survive was to not give away anything, while reading the room as best I could, in order to counter their plots and schemes. The saving grace is that most Machiavellian personalities believe that they are smarter than they really are and so they suffer from overlooking the obvious. But the years of this heightened anxiety and the resulting hyper vigilance left me with neural highways that led to negative thoughts and expectations. Fearful thoughts never left my side and I would wake up already hiding in the weeds.

This was no way to live. The losses of the pandemic and the resulting isolation left me sitting with my thoughts and nowhere else to go. There wasn’t any ongoing threat. There was grief with my mother’s passing that ate into my soul but I was safe.The people who manipulated and schemed with their every breath were either long gone or far away. With nothing to defend against and no plots to unravel my mind started to make things up. But then my dog died and all the over thinking stopped. When my cat passed away shortly after the dog I had to find distractions outside of my head and so I leaned hard on music. I would dance the stress away until I accidentally injured the tendons in my heel so badly while moving boxes of my mother’s stuff that my right foot could no longer hold any weight. What was left to me? Cooking. And so I coped by cooking but then I caught Covid for the 2nd time and lost my taste and smell. But I had the birds to distract me until the city stepped in. Then I had nothing to distract me. All that was left was my thoughts.

It was still no way to live but I was forced to try something different. I tried stopping the thoughts by focusing on the energy and where I felt it in my body and picturing them going away as if they were dust I was blowing away. They went away but came back quickly. I would repeat this every time I noticed the heaviness or the tightness building up again. I learned to stop them over time but that was only half the answer. Living without thoughts means living without hopes, dreams, or goals. I had been practicing thanking the universe every morning for the chance to create another day without thinking through what that really meant. It was a good thing but it also was unfinished and rough around the edges. With enough time and enough space from the negative thought patterns I realized that in order to create the day anew every morning it would require using my thoughts to benefit me and those I encountered during my day.

It was time to figure out thought by thought just what exactly made up a day that I would be proud of creating. I started this blog around that time to anchor my thoughts about it all on something resembling paper. Putting thoughts out in the open and changing my world by stating what was in my heart. That’s the crux of it. If we go through life without thinking then we aren’t really taking advantage of our time here and we often end up really unhappy with the results. Imagine cooking dinner based on the ingredients that we just happened to randomly encounter during that day. Some days might be a gastronomic feast but others would end up unpalatable. We don’t make our meals that way and letting our lives be decided by random events or choices made without thought can lead to worse outcomes than a terrible meal.

If we choose to fuel our thoughts with anger, bitterness, jealousy, & other negative emotions we will see the world with those glasses. When we see the world through that filter, we react and plan as if that is reality and so it will become our reality. How does that work? The world outside our head is both good and bad. Whichever we look for is what we will find. If we’re panning for gold in a stream we’ll notice any shiny yellow flakes that are around but maybe not the beauty of the trees and the songs of the birds all around us. Everything: good, bad, happy, sad, scary, uplifting, honest and dishonest is there all around us all of the time. Changing our thoughts changes our emotions and what we’re looking for as confirmation of our biases.

I had to go through this entire experience to finally get it. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It might sound like manifesting or ‘fake it until you make it’ but whatever label one wishes to put on it mastering our thoughts is one of the very few things in life that we can control. It doesn’t change the world but it can help us keep the world from changing us without our permission. If you catch yourself assuming the worst will happen, or waiting on deciding what to do based on what someone else is doing those are choices you’re making. You get to decide if you want to make that choice. Assuming the best will happen won’t affect the world around you but it will affect you and you will probably make different choices based on that assumption than you would if you assumed the worst. Making different choices tends to lead to different outcomes. If you’re waiting to make that decision because of what someone else might choose, you’re not making a decision for your authentic self. You might not even know what you want anymore if you continue on that route for too long. But, if you instead choose as if the other person is not the author of the situation you retain your control of your own thoughts and yourself.

It’s not easy to consciously choose our thoughts all day long. I haven’t come close to managing it yet. I might never get it mastered but every choice I make to be the authentic me is one more step in the right direction. Some of the choices are scary, it requires us to face the things that have made our choices for us. There are no guarantees of outcomes other than we will be ourselves in a world where we will be challenged and called out every day even by ourselves. Decide to think for yourself and then choose which emotion you take into your day with you as if you’re deciding what sandwich you’re making for your lunch. You can always choose differently tomorrow but there’s no reason to let someone else choose for you.