‘Til My Sorry Life Has Ceased

As a slight addendum to the last entry, I am now in the middle of doing what I usually do after I make a decision – second guessing it. And I realise how ironic that is, given that I was so annoyed with my parents potentially doing the same thing. 

But this is what I always seem to do. Even when I am 100% sure about something, my mind starts to run through possibilities that make me doubt myself and the choices I have made.

At my old job – the one I got before started working at The Hive – there was a man I worked with who said I had one of the fastest minds he had seen. Not the smartest, nor the brightest, nor the most intelligent, but one that could run through all the variables in a situation and either make a decision or present all the reasonable alternatives within a few minutes (and sometimes some of the more unreasonable if entertaining alternatives).

And generally it’s how I still do things today. Whether I am trying to solve a problem at work (which, as my username suggests, mostly involves writing software for my employers and their tenants. Tthere is also a lot of IT support involved as well, but "codemonkey" is more recognisable as a phrase than "techmonkey") or figuring out what to do with the house, I tend to think it through quickly and make a decision about how to proceed. 

But sometimes – and it happens more often than I’d like – I start to think about what I’ve decided and start to worry about all the things I might have missed or might have got wrong.

For example, now I am wondering if the nice Mr Steve who called at my door is in fact a criminal mastermind who is going to rip me off. Even though – when I was talking to him and reviewing all the papers and so on – I was certain of what I was doing, my mind is now betraying itself and making me doubt everything I have done.

Logically, there is a limit as to how much they can actually rip me off. They have said how much they will charge me (which is next to nothing) and they can’t increase that. Plus, if they don’t turn up, or don’t do the work, then I don’t have to pay them.

And since I know that, you would think that my mind wouldn’t be running wild. 

But it is.

I know where this trait comes from, of course. Like most of my major personality traits, it comes from the time my older sister was killed. 

It was, undeniably, the event that had the biggest influence on my life. Up until that point – I had just turned eighteen – I had experience some tragedy in my life, but it was tragedy that was expected, if that makes sense. 

When you are young, and an older relative dies (such as a great aunt you’ve never met, or an aunt you have met but didn’t see all that often), then you understand the idea that it’s sad, but you don’t fully get it. 

Even the death of a younger friend of ours when I was nine didn’t change me that much. I mean – I knew he was dead and we wouldn’t see him again, but it just seemed to be one of those things. 

But Melody’s death…. it changed everything. 

On the one hand, it did change a few things for the better. I became a much calmer person, I stopped holding grudges, I learned to forgive (but not forget). And – for the most part – I have kept my life like that. Even now, I rarely spend a long time being angry about things, and I rarely hold on to an annoyance. I just let it go, because – as trite and cliched as it sounds – life is short and in the long run, it’s just not worth letting your anger at someone control your life.

And before my sister died, my little brother and I fought. A lot. We didn’t get along with each other at all. Now – well, recently we seem to be falling back in to old patterns, but that is a topic for another time. And even when we fall in to these patterns, it is no where near as bad as it was when we were younger.

But because one day we sent my sister off to university and she never came back, I now have the tendency to let my imagination run riot for the smallest and most insignificant reasons.

If I try phoning my parents and they don’t respond for a while, my mind sometimes starts to wonder why they haven’t responded. If my girlfriend doesn’t come on line for a whole day, I start to think of all the reasons why she isn’t on line. 

And it won’t come as any surprise to you to learn that there are always – ALWAYS – entirely innocent explanations for whatever I am worrying about. Router failure, being out on church business or helping with random charity events. And even as I am worrying and panicing, I know that there are logical, innocent explanations and that I am just being stupid and overly paranoid.

You would think that having an "exceptionally fast mind" would make it better, but it just means I can jump to conclusions (or more accurately jump to the wrong conclusions) a lot faster. 

And the habit of worrying about what might have happened to friends/family/loved ones also means that I can worry about what I have decided less than four hours ago, and decide that it is entirely the wrong thing and a bit stupid. 

Would I change it? I don’t know. While occasionally second guessing myself, and spending the odd evening worrying about things that are simply a figment of my imagination, are not good things, I think the fact that I now very rarely let hatred and loathing dominate my life is a very good thing indeed. 

But still – I would like to not spend the next three or four days wondering if Steve is a master criminal or the good guy that he almost certainly is.