OBSESSED x
I am obsessed and maybe unhinged but I am coping.
It creeps in slowly, softly, almost without warning. Once becomes twice becomes a hundred times. I count them on the abacus the dictates my whole life. How many hours spent? How many turns taken? How many days wasted?
I blamed it on being miserable and then I got happier. I blamed it on being lonely and then I only felt lonesome in my dreams (and then I got lonely again but nothing changed - now I don’t know if I’m lonely or just pathetic). I blame it on being uncertain but what kind of coping mechanism is this really?
It sticks the way everything does to the fickle thing I pretend is my personality. I am Velcro and once stuck it becomes harder still to become unstuck. So I will pick up habits and hobbies and hand on heart (but not honest to God) interests.
I am afraid of being boring. I am afraid of being bored.
I filled my calendar with a hundred plans but were they wants or were they just distractions? I wipe the diary clean and now I have nothing to do but stare at the same crack in my ceiling for days on end.
I am desperate to cope but I am desperate to live all the same.
When will I stop being obsessed, being this wretched wretch of a wreck?
Where did my mind run off to? I need to find it once again. I need a treasure map to remember where I left the sane, rational portion of my brain because it is not here with me. It creeps out and then runs away and I am left with nothing but the slight hysteria that there must be something here for me to long for, to cling onto.
I can convince and corral and compromise but it is what it is. I am obsessed.
Over and over again.
I am obsessed and it feels good and then it feels bad and then I want to stop myself.
I ban myself from songs and shows and stories because they send me back off the deep end.
Am I not one unhealthy half step away from addiction?
I am daydreaming and I am fantasising and I am imagining a life far away from my own. Nothing is ever good enough to be good enough. Nothing to leave me satisfied. Nothing feels enough to fill the gaping hole that this fantasy leaves in me.
I cannot look life in the eye. I cannot accept that the fantasies aren’t real and the dreams aren’t true. Sometimes they are all that get me through the day. Who wants to wake up when your dreams are vivid enough to be believed?
Who wants to put the lie down when the truth would be so boring?
I am not living. I am dreaming about it.
I am not loving. I am fantasising about it.
Sometimes I look at myself and see nothing but the dark red of obsession bleeding out of me. I am green with envy and blue with sadness but nothing suits me so well as the deep maroon of obsessed.
I am a hundred different people. Sometimes all at once.
My obsession turns purple and then it turns black and then it withers away somewhere for me to forget. Until I am obsessed all over again.
I am obsessed and when I’m obsessed I can disassociate and then for a small unfathomable moment I can forget. The dreary grey of real life. That I am supposed to be enjoying becoming but all I want to do is be (I have been becoming for so long now).
So I am obsessed with lives I cannot have and people I cannot meet.
I am obsessed and maybe unhinged but I am coping.
Obsessed x
Where else to find my writing:
This feels less “unhinged” and more like a nervous system trying to regulate itself the only way it knows how.
Obsession can feel electric. It gives structure. It gives color. It gives something to grip when real life feels flat or directionless. Fantasy is stimulating. Reality is repetitive. Of course your brain prefers the vivid thing.
But what you wrote here is the most important line: I am not living. I am dreaming about it.
That awareness matters. Obsession becomes dangerous when you cannot see it. You can see it. You are questioning it. That is not insanity. That is consciousness.
It sounds less like addiction and more like avoidance mixed with a fear of emptiness. When there is space, your mind fills it with intensity. When there is quiet, you manufacture meaning. That does not make you broken. It makes you uncomfortable with stillness.
The work is not to kill your imagination. That is clearly one of your strengths. The work is to slowly build a life that feels vivid enough that you do not need to escape it.
Start small. One real thing each day that is not fantasy. One uncomfortable present-moment choice. You do not have to rip the maroon out of yourself. Just introduce new colors.
You are not a wreck. You are someone who feels deeply and has not yet learned how to sit with the grey.
And the fact that you wrote this instead of fully disappearing into it? That is already you trying to come back.