There’s a sense that naming a thing gives one power over it.
I notice many parts of myself and name them. This is the impulse to move. This is the “itchy” feeling. This is the “sad”. This feeling means I want booze.
I’ve noticed and verbalized many thought patterns. In so doing I deceived many individuals, myself included, into believing I’ve a higher capacity for self-actualization than is native. People believe that, because I can tell them my self-loathing states arise from an intense anxiety with no outlet due to the failure of the brain to latch onto any activity it could work with to move past this state and into achieving any of my ostensible goals, writing, fitness, a career, thus feeding more energy into the anxious state which becomes a pervasive static pulsing dissonance into every new thought train until the brain shuts down and I find myself coping with chemicals and low-energy dopamine mining activities, I must have power over such states and be able to find my way out.
Being able to verbalize that one is bleeding out through a wound in his abdomen does not help him staunch it.
I am rewarded extrinsically for being able to verbalize complex notions of self and modes of thought. I despise outside help. My verbalizations evidently are part of seeking outside help. It is part of the pathetic cycle one often sees young or otherwise lost people in when they read a thousand systems looking to have one explain themselves to them, when they look for a psychic to spell out their nuances, a therapist to work themselves out on, looking for any mirror with commentary spelled around the edges.
It is the deeply ironic neurosis of an individual who is self-aware but incapable of presence, of the application of that awareness to change action.
It is not impossible for one caught in this loop of thought to address the assiduously labelled patterns of thought. Labeling isn’t worthless. The first step to change is often the recognition of a pattern that I wish to change. Noticing when the problem pattern arises. Engaging it. Parsing what about the situation I am in brought it about. Developing strategies for addressing it.
This is simply to note that noticing a pattern does not make one particularly intelligent, nor terribly adept at changing their behavior. I say I have a problem, I repeat “I have a problem”, and I still have a problem.
- 8.19.2021
