Maybe what feels like confusion is really just overstimulation — the side effect of never letting my mind be still.
This time, I’ve learned to skip the dance of niceties one partakes in as a result of a prolonged absence. In other words, we’ve been MIA and that’s A-Okay. Because absence, it turns out, can be clarifying.
So today’s topic revolves around feelings. These beautiful things that dictate our entire lived experience, influence the paths that we take (or don’t) and how we go about our everyday.
Lately, I’ve been feeling discombobulated – actually who am I kidding, when am I not? About what you ask? About where I’m going, why I’m taking certain decisions, why I’m not actioning others and in the grand scheme of things – what’s really going on? Simply put, I’ve lost intentionality in how I live – living and reliving the constant hamster wheel of work, sleep, eat, workout, socialize and repeat.
But maybe I’m not actually lost. Maybe I’m just distracted. Maybe what feels like confusion is really just overstimulation — the side effect of never letting my mind be still. Somewhere along the way, I replaced boredom with background noise, and now I mistake silence for absence.
It’s funny — I often hear my friends say they feel lost too, and sure, that’s part of being twenty-something. But I can’t help thinking that a lot of it comes from the noise we’re constantly drowning in — TikTok, texts, notifications, endless scrolls of something. Because without these attention sucking applications, maybe we’d actually have the time to be – simply “bored”. And yes, it’s annoying at first, don’t get me wrong. The itch to reach for that device is obliterating. All my braincells abrading against one another, breaking down 1 atom at a time. No, that does not end within a minute – or two, or an hour or really the first couple days.
You struggle and struggle and struggle – until you don’t. And then your braincells, instead of resisting the detox – begin to embrace it. They even start to wander and think about the most random things – like why a washer is always at the bottom when you need to transfer wet clothes to the dryer above (dropping clothes through the process and defeating the purpose of the wash itself). All jokes aside, I think that’s what we’re all missing in our lives right now. As much as we all crave in person connection and being seen by other people, maybe we all just need a little introspection to see ourselves. Get to know what we want (and don’t).
So maybe the point isn’t to find ourselves at all — maybe it’s just to sit quietly enough that we can finally hear what’s already there.
