Mind deception

January 9th, 2024

I should probably have gotten used to it already because it happened again like clockwork, and again it happened very routinely. The pattern is the same — whenever I feel well and good and content and almost on the verge of happiness, then my mind starts to play tricks on me. The biggest and most deceptive trick my mind plays on me is to embed a single but nagging thought in my thought process — “what is wrong?”. I mean, something has to be wrong for me to feel so content, to feel so good. Feeling good is not my normal emotional state, so there has to be something wrong, something I missed around me, something I dismissed too easily, something I don’t worry enough about, something that should keep me grounded in a cavalcade of questions about myself and about all the issues around me.

I know this pattern very well, and I can work with that. I can ignore this thought, I can simply keep on doing what I was doing to feel well. I can trick myself into aiming my train of thoughts away from this question and toward an appreciation of that particular moment as I am content. And my mind knows it and it has learned a trick or two itself. My mind knows that tricking myself into feeling bad and discombobulated while I am conscious and controlling the way my thoughts go, will not work. Or rather it will be hard work since I will fight back before possibly getting triggered. So my mind does its dirty work under the cover of darkness when I am in bed under covers myself. Then, when night comes, sleep doesn't. Or if it comes eventually, it is torn into hundreds of episodes of me falling asleep and then waking up and falling asleep again, and so on and on… It brings strange dreams and remembrance of things long passed and almost forgotten. It twists and gnaws into my good feelings and stable emotions, throwing unpleasant and embarrassing questions — and I am powerless to fight back. Then, when morning comes, my good mood is gone. And again I start this uneven fight against my mind to feel well again. I am not going to stop, but honestly I am getting tired of it.