Obsessive Displacement*
People do all sorts of things to distract themselves from pain…
I always distracted myself with a different pain, one that would consume me so I would be distracted for as long as it would take me to find the strength to handle the original pain…
Today, I just realized another thing I do when painful thoughts wouldn’t let go of my poor mind… I look for things I had almost lost or forgotten. I remember random images of me tearing down my room so many times looking for things because I couldn’t deal with an emotional pain. Usually, I never found whatever I’d be looking for, and at the end, I’d collapse on the floor and start crying… and when asked, I’d just say between my sobs “I can’t find my pink top” (where the hell is that pink top anyway??!!)
Today, Ibraheem decided to mention a quote he said I once liked and then said he couldn’t locate it on either his blog or his FB status updates. It worked for a good 30 minutes a s a distraction; I summoned all my efforts to just look for it everywhere… and for the first time ever, I found something I was looking for as a distraction. I didn’t relate, and finding it didn’t help… I would have rather burst in tears because that quote couldn’t come to mind and was nowhere to be found.
We all do it, we all look for things our subconscious knows we are least likely to find when we’re in distress… it’s our desperate need to cling to false hope, especially when hope is nowhere to be seen in the horizon… we call them all sorts of things, and we keep going on and on “if only I find that, if only I know where it is…”, but in reality, we couldn’t care less, we’re just drowning in our own dark realizations and trying all we can to hold on to… whatever! We fixate on things we don’t want because we have no idea what we want, we have no idea what would make it better and we’re too drained to figure it out…
I should go home and look for that pink top.
* A made-up term, I won’t even look it up to see if it really exists!
My Oblivia 