ramblings from a chronic over-thinker (interlude: i had a nightmare)

 WRITTEN ON 12-28-25

In a perfect world, I am someone who is allowed to feel things completely and wholly without also feeling like I will collapse in on myself. I can enjoy things—media, music, tv shows, whatever—and not let it consume me like a virus on an unknowing and unwilling host. I read my own writing and see something incredible. I see a talent that other people also recognize and point out with pride etched into their features. I look in the mirror and am complete. Satisfied, and content with where I am at in my life.

But I am no such person, and this is not a perfect world.

Instead, my headphones stay glued in my ears like a constant anchor to reality, the only thing I can rely on to never let me down. The music drowns out my need to tell everyone my deepest secrets for attention and reminds me that I am real. I am a person that other people perceive. I’ve always wondered what other people think of me. I know that’s something that you’re not supposed to be concerned about, something you’re not supposed to say out loud. That the “most important thing is that you love yourself”, but anyone who says that is spouting complete bullshit and must be very rich. I know, somewhere deep down, that realistically most people also feel the same way that I do and are also utterly miserable. Somehow though, it’s like no one actually gets what I mean when I say that I am deeply and extremely obsessed with something. I suppose that’s what the “obsessive” part in obsessive compulsive disorder means though.

I let each debilitating thought wash over me and spread throughout my body. I can feel it breaking me more and more each day, stealing sleep from my eyes and tricking my stomach into only craving caffeine and a life greater than this. I’m watching a podcast with an actor I love. I do this often. I also love to spiral into a world of yearning and indescribable dread for an alternate universe where I am the one being interviewed.

Since I was a kid, my biggest dream was to be an actor. First it started with a Broadway dream, then quickly I realized that tv was the real goal. I begged for an agent, for help from someone older and wiser than myself. But I was “mature” for my age, and everyone in my life seemed to forget that I was only 8, not 18. I could not think for myself enough to know how to express how important this truly was to me. Even if I could, I think the general consensus was that I would be able to figure it out on my own, I was, “resourceful” as everyone and their mother would parrot at me. Maybe it isn’t fair to feel resentful towards my elders for not being more on top of things as a kid. They quite literally fed and housed me willingly and without protest, giving up on their own dreams to help me with mine. But just let me feel selfish for once without the immense guilt that comes from feeling. It wasn’t their job to do everything for me, they had more important and serious shit going on, and anyways, acting is something I can do anytime, who cares about being a child actor anymore?

Everyone that has big dreams and actually gets them always say that you just have to keep putting yourself out there until something sticks. I wonder why I haven’t done more. At a certain point, it does become my job to do the work to get there. Since acting is off the table I guess, considering I haven’t done any film acting since high school and I don’t have an agent, I’ll focus on this. Writing… and writing, and writing. Jesus Christ. I haven’t even done anything with this. I tell my sob story in a million different fonts, through a million different metaphors, breaking the fourth wall as I look at this cursor moving slower and slower across my screen. But the truth is, I’m not doing a single fucking thing about it. I write, I complain, I watch an interview with men and women that are cooler and more confident than I will ever be and I cry and scream into my pillow wishing it were me and doing absolutely nothing about it.

I want to be great or nothing. I want a million people to know my name and watch interviews of me thinking exactly what I think every night before I go to bed. At least that means my life would matter to someone more than just an average office job, where I come home to my boring house in the lower-middle-class suburbs in the middle of fucking nowhere, with my children that I never wanted, and a loveless marriage where I’m as good of a wife as I am a mother. My biggest nightmare is being normal. I would rather kill myself than live a life struggling for money and having nothing to be proud of. In Whiplash, my favorite scene is where Andrew Neiman says he would rather die young being known than live his entire life with no one knowing his name. I would fucking kill to be known. Doesn’t everyone? Isn’t it just a crushing feeling to be someone so small and insignificant in this massive, dying world full of the most corrupt people you can think of that have way more money than I have ever seen in my entire life, and probably never will? My generation may be full of nihilists who drink, and smoke, and curse, and don’t give a shit about anything anymore, but at least we’re trying to live. Who gives a fuck about living until 86 if you’re miserable and nothing? How unbelievably depressing to live as a nobody.

Maybe I’m too harsh. I’ve been told I lack empathy more than once by my mother who is exactly like me, except she shows her emotions better than me. She is wiser and better than I could ever hope to be, and I compare myself to the incomparable like I’m being graded on it. At least that is one thing that I know I excel in. My 3.8 GPA can’t be for nothing. Anyways, apparently I’m bad with emotions. I can’t show a single thing, because it’s wrapped up in me like a noose, sitting deep in my body somewhere hidden, choking me slowly with the intense bittersweet agony that is yearning and a constant fear of living up to my own expectations. I don’t have time to think about others, I can’t. it’s not selfish, it’s protective. I would’ve been dead years ago if I still cared as much about people as I used to. It’s not sad, it’s simply a statement of fact. People get too worried now if you say the smallest thing. Words have such intense meaning and in a world of politically correct twitter users and 11-year-old mindless robots who sprout out anything they hear from the brain-rot side of TikTok, the second an adult hears that you’re “going to kill yourself” after a small inconvenience, it becomes a worldwide lockup for your own safety. News flash: it’s not that deep. Almost every teenager in today’s day and age has thought about or said they were going to kill themselves at one point or another. It’s how people cope. I don’t judge the way you laugh at an AI puppy video on Facebook, don’t judge my way of coping either.

Speaking of coping, I don’t think my body has caught up with that memo yet. Speaking of further, (and to break the fourth wall again) its currently 4:13 in the morning and I am typing this as I blink sleep out of my eyes and try desperately to stay awake because my stupid fucking evil brain decided to give me a nightmare for the second time in one week. Merry fucking Christmas-Eve-eve I guess! (that was the first time it happened). I never dream, I barely wake up in the middle of the night, so for this to be the second time in such a short time frame is extremely telling. I need to sage my room. I keep freaking myself out over literally nothing. I just gave my body chills talking about that. Nice one! The first time this happened in this two-part saga, I couldn’t even tell you what my first nightmare was about, but I was up every single hour of the night unable to sleep, before I finally just stayed up at 6:30 am and felt like the sweet release of death would have been better than whatever hellscape of sleep I just experienced. Following that dreaded night, I had the displeasure of being unable to sleep-in long enough to need to turn my alarm off. Every night for the past week, since that first Satan-motivated, God-fearing debacle, I’ve gone to sleep begging to stay like that the whole night. I had a soul feeling that this would happen tonight though; while brushing my teeth I had a random thought that I missed waking up and staying up (which first of all, what the fuck.) and that it would probably happen again tonight. Well! Here we are. At 4:21 in the morning with fucking “Love Me Again” by John Newman blasting in my ears on repeat because for some reason his loud brass instrument sequences and low-key grating voice is the only thing to lull me into a sort of comfort as I type away blocks of endless nightmare-fueled ramblings.

You can tell I’m tired because the brain-to-screen filter is close to gone and I have forgone all the pleasantries of proper writing and not cursing every second to instead give you the raw unfiltered clusterfuck that is me fearing for my life and my sleep schedule one AO3-font-word at a time. John has now stepped into the territory of making me more paranoid and also annoyed. I’ve put on the Challengers theme. Let’s fucking ride. Lock in guys I’m getting my hands ready on this keyboard like I’m about to drive a fucking formula one racecar down a very busy pedestrian crosswalk. 20 points all around!

 …Maybe not that. Maybe they are bad people! Let me think my evil thoughts. It is 4:30 in the morning and I don’t have the mental energy or capability to try and be a kind and politically correct person. The nightmare that is God-is-punishing-me-and-fucking-my-sleep-schedule can handle the backlash of me talking out of my ass because I don’t want to go back to sleep. Am I a coward for not going back to sleep because I had a random dream that gave me a bit of a fright? No. Fuck off. I am not a pussy. I am a woman who is on her period and hasn’t had a solid full-night’s rest in a week and I am starting to feel extremely empathetic towards insomniacs. I am forgetting what it feels like to sleep and wake up feeling rested without wanting to kill everyone and everything I see if they look at me wrong. I definitely need to sage my room. Someone is trying to fuck with my energy here and I will not be having it.

I should be trying to sleep again, as it is clearly what my body needs most because it is trying to collapse in on itself, and yet the fear that runs through my body as I conceptualize the idea of having to face my own brain again with blind trust and zero predictability that it will grant me an entire night of sleep is enough for me to continue with my constant and irritating ranting here. I think I’m depressed. I always hate the new year, my brain loves to make me hate myself and isolate from everyone I know when good things start happening to me because I don’t believe that I deserve good things in my life even though realistically it’s about fucking time because all I have ever done for my entire life is work towards the one goal that I have and I’ve achieved that for the most part (the realistic goal, that is, and holy run-on sentence). I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that sometimes you get nice things and don’t have to do things in return. America is such a transactional part of the world and when you grow up surrounded by evil white rich capitalists for your entire developmental years, you start to have some preconceived notions for how interactions between people are going to work.

I had a conversation with my parents the other day when we went out to dinner, and I said that I think most people are stupid, but they are also so incredibly interesting. People want others to like them, it’s a simple concept, but some people will do absolutely anything to get others to like them. Observing any interaction whether it be between myself and someone else or two other people who I don’t know, watching people is one of my favorite past times, besides listening to music, and, like anything else I can think of. Point is, humans will do the strangest things in conversation, such as laugh at something that is so clearly unfunny, or say they are good when asked how they are, not because they are actually doing good (almost everyone is depressed nowadays, it’s almost 2026, and Donald Trump is still our president, who the fuck is doing good now?) but because that is the polite common thing to do in usual interactions.

Anyways, I’m not a sociopath. At least, not right now I’m not, though I have been told by close friends and family that I remind them most of Wednesday Addams. It could just simply be her unending cynicism and love of medieval torture (check), but it could also be her hatred for people and her deadpan stare (check, and check if I forget that I’m in public and people can see my lack of a facial expression). Apparently, I am too monotone sometimes, and that can be seen as me being disinterested, but I am simply studying what’s going on in the conversation and don’t have anything good to add to it. I’d say instead that I am extremely emotional and intuitive (yes, I am a Pisces). I went 16 years of my life being a people pleaser, having my energy drained after every interaction I had. So, now I have learned how to turn down the level in which I project my emotions in dire situations so I can instead focus on what is actually going on and not be weighed down by my own emotional state. Is this healthy? Considering it’s now 5 in the morning and I haven’t slept well in a week; my answer is no. Has this helped me to avoid the inevitable which is me realizing that my life is an endless and suffocating loop of yearning and obsessive behavior and repetition, that will eventually lead to me being the greatest creator alive, or joining the 27 club like Kurt Cobain? Yes. Let me live my life and feel my things and watch my shows. We listen and we don’t judge. We all do what we can.

Maybe now I can finally try and rest without the looming evil thoughts of my brain’s own creation. I could collapse from the tiredness I feel in my bones. This is the first night in 2 days that I can sleep alone in my own bed since I have had my lovely best friend staying with me and I don’t even get the chance to enjoy the ability to sprawl out in my bed because it was spent with me cowering in fear, afraid to move like my dream came alive. It didn’t, but the consensus is that I am very happy that I meet with my therapist soon. Perhaps she can direct me to a psychiatrist that won’t ghost me and can diagnose me with even more mental problems, like finally getting that depression diagnosis. Who knows! The possibilities are endless with someone like me.