I know I focus on individual events in my life, but at that moment they’re important to me. Maybe in the whole scheme of things they’re relatively small events, but they are not inconsequential to me. The things I experience make up my reality.
Maybe you don’t see how these individual events could be related or important because you have an incomplete idea of what’s going on in the rest of my life, and you’re unable to see things from my perspective. Of course this is understandable since you live on the other side of the country, and I haven’t actually talked to you for months (for a reason).
All the individual events make my life interesting and worth sticking around for. I’m not exactly sure what this “bigger picture” is suppose to be. I’m not particularly interested in focusing on some ambiguous big end result. I’m interested in the process, the steps that take me there. If I forget about individual events I risk forgetting anything I could have learned from that experience. Or I risk glossing over details and getting some romanticized residual memory that doesn’t do me any good later.
I write things down because I know I that otherwise I will forget them. Writing down the little details makes it possible for me to better organize them (and the many other related events you never see) and understand them in retrospect. Looking over these litte things together make it easier for me to interpret and understand new experiences. Some people just do this all in their head I guess, but I can’t. In my head everything just goes in circles.
Maybe I over analyze things, but I think it’s better than not thinking about them at all. I’d rather be overly aware and analyze events than be mindless and pretend that nothing matters and details are trivial, because they’re not.
I don’t mind personal critiques, usually they help me notice something or improve and I appreciate them. You can tell me what you think about me or my personal choices or whatever. But if you imply that my experiences not worth talking or even thinking about, it just makes me feel like everything I care about is inconsequential. And thats just not cool, especially since you’ve done it more than once.
So this got long and rambly because I thought about something too much, but I don’t care because I had to get it out there.
2 Comments
My philosophy teacher told me “the major cause of depression is self-introspection”. Now you’re obviously not depressed or anything (or at least I hope not) but I DO think you analyze things too much. The fact that you felt you had to respond and defend yourself to what I said to such detail kind of proves my point. Why let it get to you if you know it isn’t true?
I’m not really that eloquent so I can’t come up with something that sounds quite so profound, but I’ll say this, Neal you’re being a jerk, how about you stop rubbing salt in the wound and leave it alone’ It might be easy for you to ignore what people say because you’re comfortable with yourself, congrats I’m happy for you. For the rest of us we still deal with our insecurities. So please watch us from your pedestal in peace.