Confessions of An Overthinker

Ok this weeks episode is very vulnerable. 

I explore my overthinking tendencies and how this shows up in my life. One of the ways this shows up, is in the belief that I am ‘too much’ for others. That my presence is too much and that I need to dim myself down to be able to fit in and connect with others. However, all this has done has encouraged me to connect to the wrong people. People that don’t align with me. That’s not to say these people in my past have been bad or wrong in any way, but I have been the one to lose out because I have been altering myself to fit in when, if I had stayed authentic to myself, I would have eventually found connections that align with who I actually am! It’s a very scary prospect though because staying true to yourself puts you in a position of being rejected and that is a scary thought. But I’m trying to work through my relationship with that. 

This episode is definitely a daunting one to share but FUCK IT, I don’t get a second chance at this life and I know that by sharing this, I will strengthen the courage I need to keep being ME.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Confessions of an overthinker is my episode title for today. And the reason that I want to touch on this is because this may be one of my biggest insecurities. Um not the fact that I overthink. I think that that's something that I'm pretty open about, but it's it's the reason I think the fact that I overthink causes me to feel insecure, and um and there are two common thoughts that whirl around in my mind that I hope by sharing them, I first of all help myself by talking through them, um, and second of all help those that may feel and relate to these insecurities. They I hope that they feel a little bit more validated and um and maybe can laugh at the insecurities with me. Um that's kind of the aim of of the of the walkthrough. So let's just get into it and see and see um and see if I if I manage to succeed in that. So yeah, confessions of an overthinker. I hi, I'm Victoria. Hi, I'm a huge overthinker. I am yeah, my my brain loves to spiral. I love to get into the weeds of a thought or an action or something I said and how that might have come across, and da da da. I think it's a price that I have to pay by being self-aware. Something that I love about myself, but something that is quite tiring sometimes. And especially if I'm tired or if I'm anxious or if I'm hormonal or if I'm just in my feels for whatever reason, I'm grieving or depressed. Um, those overthinking patterns come, they just take over. Now, so I'm 24 now. When I was 19, I discovered the world of self-help, and I started to realize how my thought patterns and processes were really detrimental to me, and so I managed to, and so that's kind of where like the self-exploration came, and I started to strengthen my own tools and abilities to hold back, you know, the the the spirals and um or fight back, I guess. Um, but something that I have made peace with is that that is the way that my brain is structured. Now I really believe in like neuroplasticity and the fact that we can rewire our brain. I'm super, super like a huge believer of that. Not only I'm a believer, it's scientifically proven, it's a fact, but I know that I have managed to rewire so many thought processes that I used to I never used to question beforehand, and they don't even come up anymore. But it's a it's quite a deep issue, it's a lot more profound than maybe I'd like for it to be, and so it's something that I hold within me, it's something I'm working through, and it's something that I will most probably be working through for the rest of my life, and I'm okay with that. That's not something that I, you know, I'm scared of. Um, of course, it would be nice to be in a place where my initial thought processes aren't to overthink and to be anxious around the most basic behaviours, but or just anxious around me existing. I laugh because actually, if I don't laugh, I probably will cry. So um, but as of right now, I am getting much better and I can feel it, I feel it's like I can see it, you know, happening in real time. Um, an example is so like when I'm tired, hormonal, maybe a little bit depressed, bored, um I begin to overthink, I start to consider and focus on all of the life choices that I had made that meant that I'm in this moment, where I went wrong, the people that I've upset, the ways that I didn't express myself properly, the ways that I was misunderstood, all of the disappointments that I've done in my life, right? And I I know this about myself, and I've I've done this my whole life, so I get into a spiral of self-hatred and self-um and self-p uh pity. It's it's really sad saying it out loud and feeling so familiar with the feelings, but I know that that is my default, and so literally last night I was in one of those spirals. I was hormonal, tired, agitated, had drunk way too much coffee, and I started going into that spiral, and I felt and I was trying to distract myself and I was trying to find um other things to occupy my mind, but it was bigger than my mind, so I recognised that, and I gave into it, and I allowed myself to feel to feel the the self-pity, the self-hatred, the whatever. Um I did that by talking through it. I literally look at myself in the mirror and I talk through my feelings, I hear myself say what I'm saying and feeling, and when I hear myself, I can sometimes be like, uh what? Like, why are you like I it's as if my mind and my body are sometimes disconnected, and so when I say things or when I say how I feel, I then feel what I'm saying, and then I don't align with it because I'm like I don't agree with my thoughts, like my thoughts are not what I'm feeling, so something's been misaligned here, and I need to just like let that go. So I kind of work through it, like so. Yeah, I will. I'll sometimes just talk to myself in the mirror about what it is that I'm thinking and feeling, and that really really helps me. Sometimes um that's not enough, so I will write down all of my thoughts and feelings and just get it out on paper. That really really helps. I find like having like a paper trail of the thoughts and feelings is very, very powerful. And what I do is I make sure I'm not around people, I have my phone switched off. Um I feel I know I feel tired, but I usually can't switch my mind off, so I will read a book or I'll put some like music on that relaxes me. I'll lighten in sensitive and I will just exist and just feel, and then eventually I will manage to switch off. Now that's my process, and that's taken me five years of self-work to get to this place, which I still get into a spiral, it does somewhat ruin my evening, but I'm able to bring myself back. And the reason I say that I know that it's changing, and I know that my brain is getting better at catching myself is because when I was falling, I was drifting off to sleep, and I started and I I went back to this sort of like thinking through all of the mistakes I've made and all of the things that I've done in my life that has been a huge disappointment. I caught myself using a method that I learned with the positive intelligence course I've referenced earlier. So, what you do is you catch the the judge in your mind, you the the negative critic that we have, we all have um that this course calls calls it the judge. And then I started to question it, and I was like, Okay, are we gonna do this? Let's do this then. If we're gonna go through all of the disappointments that I've done in my life, let's think about all of the things that I've done right, every single thing. And actually, my friend Camille, who I um said about last week, who told me about the failure goals, she also said that the book that she's in the book that she's reading, they say to write a list of all of the beliefs that got you to the place that you're at in your life currently, all of them, and then you divide them between what beliefs are holding you back and what beliefs are pushing you forwards. So I decided to focus on the beliefs that were pushing me forwards. So I went through and I was thinking about all of the things that I have done right in my life, and the fact that I was able to not only like calm my nervous system by pulling myself away from like other people, reading a book, like slowing down, turning my phone off, like turning that anxious attachment that I have towards it, slowing down, and then eventually allowing myself to fall asleep, and when I came back into it because I was tired, that negative spiral, I was able to pull myself back out of it. Um that is a huge win for me, like a serious, huge, huge, huge win. And um and it's taken it's taken time, of course. It's taken time, it's taken patience, it's taken some dances with depression, um, it's taken some really, really low moments and some really really difficult experiences. And actually feeling, you know, like a couple of episodes ago, I I talk about experience. The fact that I had exper I've experienced this spiral so so many times before in my life, it's like a physical sensation. I know it now, it's a familiar feeling, and so when I know that it's happening, I'm able to like catch it and stop it. And it doesn't ruin my weeks anymore, like these spirals don't ruin my weeks, they might ruin a couple of hours of a day of mine, and eventually they'll only ruin minutes, maybe even seconds. I'm putting it out there. Um but like but that's already a huge win, an absolutely huge win. So um, so yeah, I I actually didn't expect myself to go down that spiral, but I'm glad I did because that was clearly important for me to share. Um and I hope that's of help or of value to somebody uh listening, and um I'm gonna go into more detail about the PQ experience that I had gone through because it comes up and I'm realising it comes up more than maybe I appreciate, and it's it's been a huge, huge player in changing my mentality and changing my my thought processes. So I'd like to share that with with you all. Um but I'll do a separate episode on that one, but yeah, I want to also touch on like the two kind of big insecurities that I would say come under this um the umbrella of me being an overthinker, which are me being someone that is too much, I'm doing quotations for those listening, and conversely not being enough or not doing enough. Which to someone listening who isn't an overthinker, and thinking like how how are you, how can you be both of those things at once? First of all, hugely, hugely jealous of your brain processes, like seriously would love to understand how you think. Um, and second of all, this episode actually might not be for you. Um, feel free to listen along, but it's just not gonna resonate, so that's absolutely fine if it doesn't resonate because it's a weird um combination of both. And I will say, as a woman, obviously, I am biased in that I spend a lot of time with women in my life, I just naturally connect and draw myself more to women. I would say that it's more of a woman experience, however, that it's not exclusive, it doesn't mean that it's not something that men also experience, but I would say that a lot more women do. Um so yeah, I I would I would say that in my yeah, I would say that my biggest insecurity in life as of right now is being too much. Now let me explain. Um I am somebody that feels things very intensely. I experience joy very profoundly, I experience depression very profoundly, I experience other people's feelings very like I feel it. Um I I just I feel so much and I and I'm very intense. Like in the mornings, I've always been someone that like I wake up and I want to talk. I just want to go through my my thoughts, my dreams, my feelings, my hopes for the day, my hopes for the week. My parents used to call it verbal diarrhea. I would wake up in the morning before school, every day religiously, I would burst into my parents' room, I would get in my mum's side of the bed, my dad would be getting ready for work, and I would just talk. I would talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. I would talk about everything, anything. I just would want to speak, and it was always something that we laughed about because it was so early, and I was just so full of life and ready to go, and um, and so from a very young age, I have known that I am a lot and I'm very intense. I just I know in in so much of my life, like I am I'm a lot, my voice is loud, and my laugh is booming, and I'm not like a tall person by any means, but I'm very like I move my body a lot and I use my arms and I stretch myself and like my legs, and everything is very performative, but not in a way that's false. I just am that way, it's always been how I've been. And um my first ever male therapist said to me that when I told him that I did gymnastics when I was younger, he was like, Oh my god, this makes so much sense. Whenever I meet you, I feel as though you're like getting ready to present like a gymnast at the beginning of like every single you know, um stunt they do, or or what's it called? Like apparatus, damn it, I've forgotten the name. Um, but like if they're gonna go on the floor or on the beam or the bars, they do like a presenting before they do the their performance, and like I I'm just I am naturally that way, and I'm sure that it has something to do with my my upbringing in gymnastics. Um but I'm also aware of the fact that that can sometimes like be too much for someone, like it's too much for others to handle, and I don't want to be excluded because I'm too much, and because I know that other people cannot handle all of that, all of that candy Gemma Collins reference there, um because I know that other people cannot handle all of me I dim my light, I dim my self-expression, I dim my thoughts, I dumb myself down so that I fit in and so that people will accept me. And that is obviously something that I built as a kind of protective mechanism, and I understand exactly why. Like, of course, it makes sense for especially like a young teenage girl, like I don't want to be the too much girl, you know, I don't want to be the one that like creates too much noise or has too much attention, receives too much attention, um, because like socially that's really painful to experience, and thankfully I didn't really experience that because I did dim myself down so much. But the but I'm also starting to realize that that's just not true and authentic to who I am, and my essence is too much, my literal being, who I am, is too much is so much, is so much, and I have a right to embody that so muchness. I have a right to embrace my intense feelings, my profound thoughts and ideas, my big feelings. I had an experience about a month ago when I started my therapy course. We did an intense weekend. Um, like the Saturday and the Sunday, we went into the school and we did several different um activities to kind of get ourselves to build a rapport with each other. So I'm in a class of 14 people, and because the nature of this course is we conduct therapy on each other, we needed to understand and like feel safe and comfortable within each other's presence. Um, because eventually we were all going to be each other's therapists at one point, and one of the um activities we did was this shield activity, and it was basically just us kind of telling our life story up until that point, and that experience was one of the most profound experiences I have had in my entire life because it was an environment that was that encouraged and was safe and embraced every single human being that was present, and everyone came to this activity with such vulnerability and such honesty. I felt so privileged that my colleagues felt comfortable sharing that with me and us. But I also felt so proud that we had created this space for each other, and at the end of the day, I actually cried in front of everyone. I I sobbed, like I literally sobbed, because I had never ever in my life felt as though being myself was enough in a way that I was made to feel there, I felt so held and so safe, and it was so beautiful, like it was I'll never ever ever forget that feeling, ever, ever, ever in my life. And the reason I share this is because the next day I kind of like reflected on how I felt. Like I cried, I sobbed in front of a group of a room of 15 people, and it was embarrassing. Of course, I felt embarrassed afterwards, like socially, that's just not acceptable. And I came back to the class the next day, and I said to everybody that like I think the reason that it made me feel so emotional was because I yearn so deeply for human connection, I need it so much. It's and we all do, we all do, but I but I need it like tangibly, I need something that is like visible, you know, and felt, and I felt that so deeply in that room that it made me emotional because it was obviously like tending to this part of me that really needs to feel as though I'm not too much, that I'm just okay, that I'm fine, that I'm so much, but that so muchness is more than welcome here, and yeah, that moment definitely changed me in many ways because it didn't make me feel as though I needed to hide myself and dim my shine and dim my energy and light in order to feel accepted and wanted in a space. And for people that do feel this and share this with me, I've spoken to my therapist about this, and he explained something so he he explained it in a way that was so eloquent and so powerful, and he said that there are some people that simply cannot cope with like themselves, you know, their own thoughts, their own feelings, like whatever's going on in their life. And so when somebody like you comes along who is beaming, who is light, who is explorative, who is passionate, who is curious, um, you know, and you really like to pick the weeds of certain topics and go into depth about like profound ideas and subjects and theories. He said that some people literally cannot cope, like they just cannot hold it. And that's not to say that that's you, like that you're the problem, that you need to dim your light and dim your shine, it's just that they are not going to be able to hold it. And of course, if it's someone that you love, if it's someone that you respect, that's a really difficult pill to swallow, but there will be people that can hold it, and that is what I felt in that room is that there were people there that could hold me, they could hold me, and I was safe being me, and so it's still an insecurity of mine that that shows up in my life in a variety of ways. Um whether that's when I'm looking for work, whether that's you know, like talking to specific friends or people in my life. Um but I've noticed that it be it's becoming a problem because it is it has distanced me from people I love and care about because I've not given them a chance to handle my too muchness because I'm scared that they're not gonna be able to, and therefore it'll hurt because I've had that in the past, like, especially with past relationships. I have you know, in my in my world, like my partner has to be able to hold my too muchness because like I spend so much time with that person, I'll I'll spend so much time with them that you know I I need them to be able to do that because it's it's important for me to be able to express myself with them. Um, that's like one of the things that like is probably a non-negotiable for me, I would say, and my past partners have not been able to do that, and that's not to say that they're a bad person or that they're bad people, I'm just saying that it's just that like I chose people in my life that could not hold me, and then I found out that they could not hold me in a moment and in a time of my life where I needed to be held by them, and that's a painful thing to experience because then it kind of doubles down on the self-fulfilling prophecy of like being too much, and that then obviously goes down its own overthinking spiral, and um yeah, that that was a really tough lesson pill and pill to swallow when I was in my past, funnily enough, both of my past relationships. I was made to feel I felt that way, and um yeah, that was a really really tough one because I think I kind of almost ran away from I think that that was where I I consciously started to make an effort to understand my too muchness and create a loving relationship with my too muchness. So I needed to experience that, I needed to experience the the rejection and the pain that comes with that rejection in order for me to realise how important that part of my self-expression is and how I will not settle for somebody that cannot hold that for me in that sense, um so yeah, yeah, it was uh it's been a it's this has been something that I have been working through recently with therapy and like just reading through things um and listening to Florence Given, um my absolute idol. And then yesterday I was watching a film on Netflix called People We Meet on Vacation, which Camille, my friend, um suggested to me, and it's um it's a rom-com, it's it's got its moments where it's really cringy, but for a Netflix rom-com, it's actually really lovely. Um, and the main actress, like her character is really beautiful. If you want to watch the film, skip this bit because I'm gonna I'm going to um ruin the film for you. But like the main character, she's just this like beaming light, like a very intense person, like full of life, full of thoughts, ideas, and dreams. Um like a real just like feels life, and um she and her best friend had this pact with each other that they would meet each other every single year to go on like vacation together, or on holiday, of course, in in proper English. Um and um and they would meet up every single year and go on holiday together and then like go their separate ways, and he would go back to their hometown and she would go back to her life in New York. And spoiler, they end up being together because they love each other and have loved each other their whole lives. Um, but when she kind of like comes to it and they both establish the fact that they do really like each other and they want to be together, she confesses to him that she was fearful of being too much for him, and therefore, if she only kept him like if she was only to spend a week of her year with him each year, she would manage to kind of keep him in her life because that week he could handle, but he wouldn't be able to handle her every single day of the year, kind of thing, and she used the words too much, and like I said, I'm hormonal at the moment, but oh my god, I I like really cried at that part because I really feel that I really really feel that of just like and the thing is of just being too much, of just like people not being able to handle me, and then being alone because I don't want to be alone, I don't want to be alone, I don't want to be like this crazy this beam of light and joy and dreams and hopes and desires just in the corner of my own. So I'd rather dim that down a little bit so I can fit in with everybody else, but that's not who I am. I'm the I'm so much. Um yeah, that is probably my biggest insecurity, and I am so proud of myself that I'm gonna share this. I'm really, really proud of myself for actually filming this because this is a big one. So yeah, I was gonna go into the not being enough thing, but I'm going to save that for another time because I want to dwell on that a little bit more, and I think that I've said enough today. And maybe this confessions of an overthinker can be a little bit a little bit of a podcast series. So I might do that actually. Um yeah, I will yeah, okay, that's that's it. That's it for today. Um, as always, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to listen to me. Thank you so much for your love and your support and your kind words, and like it it I mean this so genuinely seeing people like knowing that people listen, knowing that people enjoy it, um, knowing that people feel like seen or heard in any way is quite literally my biggest privilege. I I couldn't explain to I cannot put into words how much it means to me to feel as though like what I'm sharing somewhat resonates with another human being. And I know that what I'm sharing resonates with another human being because I talk about it all the time in my life, but I think that having this platform like online and being able to share these things is so powerful because I'm going to be able to reach somebody who I would never have reached in my everyday life because probably of like geographical proximity, like I just wouldn't be able to meet you. But if I did, this is the kind of conversation we would have if you were interested in that kind of stuff, which you would be because you're on my podcast channel. So, anyway, um, okay, enough, enough rambling now. I yeah, I really, really hope that you enjoyed my episode. I really appreciate you being here, and I really hope that you have a lovely, lovely rest of your day, week, month, life. Lots of love from Vic.