Overthinking

I often wonder whether my work is interesting to read, but I'm confident in saying I've always been pretty good at English as a subject. Largely this due to the fact I have a strange disposition to infer the most concrete of prose, I 'read-into' things.

In many ways it's a useful trait which has helped to get good grades - only working to improve a sentence structure or to competitively find a potential meaning out of class (no matter how obscure the evidence.) It's also one of my worst qualities. Looking back at my life so far, the deductions and conclusions are in every doubt, every rash decision and every regret.

The problem with an interpretive mind in the real world is this - we talk about authors who manipulate characters, the weather, the setting and we can't do that in real life. It seems a horribly obvious realisation that most people, including myself will pick up on having read Ian McEwan's Atonement. However it seems that this time, I missed the real, personal significance of this glaringly, blatant statement staring right at me. Briony, this little girl who wished life to be so quaint and smooth that she would predesign her world and expectantly wait for the pieces to fall into place, was my younger mirror image.

Looking at my relationships I see once more how a curious mind - one which was praised for questioning things and making up stories - had matured into a hurtful one. I'd begun to manipulate people and more often than not the people who meant most to me. Without constant reassurance it seems I would always struggle to enter willingly into the unknown, never able to believe without satisfactory proof, I had forgotten the innocent notion of trust.

But if I could trust myself that a terrible inference with little proof was correct, why couldn't I trust the people who told me they cared about me? Did I have this sad predisposition to believe the ugly truth and discard those wonderful people I deemed untruthful simply due to their wonderful-ness?

I could see myself hurting people and worse, the people closest to me where those being hurt the most. I long to believe in the good and the romance of life, and I think we're all capable of such beliefs if only we alter our perspectives and infer-the-other-way.

Try to stop explaining why things are good and simply enjoy the good. Otherwise we'd end up so deep in our own sadness we'd become selfish, manipulative creatures, constantly disappointed by an unyielding world. It's not the bad things in life that make me sad, it's the ones that I don't understand. It's the same things that in other circumstances, would feed my curious mind and fill me with such enormous satisfaction and validation.

So should we rework our understanding of real life analysis, perhaps we'd be capable of more positive thoughts and a happier life. Take the bad break up to a wonderful relationship that we could never understand; perhaps we should be more grateful for the things that person taught us, more accepting that things, sometimes, go inexplicably wrong. Despite our often cynical observations, I'd like to believe that people are still romantics who will mourn the loss of those they care for, and I know that one day we'll see the good in the pain, and we'll start to heal.