(yes, I mean mine)
And okay, fine it’s only one obsession that I’ve been obsessing about since Summer 2023 and I seem incapable of not obsessing over… it. Moving on!
A couple years ago, I was sitting in my therapist’s office telling him why I never bothered to try alcohol, not being stupid being the primary reason. The potential for turning into an alcoholic being the secondary one. But he asked me, “do you have an obsessive personality?” I had to laugh. Of course, I did. I binge ate, binge watched, overthought, and was a massive daydreamer. I’d replay the same moment, real or imaginary, in my mind over and over and over and…
Never would it get exhausting.
I liked my obsessions.
I’ll tell you the difference though, between being obsessed in your teens versus your mid-twenties (holy fuck, I’m in my mid-twenties now?): When you’re younger, you’re delusional. You give into a fantasy in which you know that person and when the reality that you really don’t hits, it knocks you off your feet and you’re left falling all over again with no one to catch you. But when you’re older, or at least more experienced, you already know that all you’re doing is clinging to little things that are more than likely inconsequential to that person and filling in all the blanks of what you don’t know with what you want.
Isn’t that where obsession comes from? From being able to manipulate someone into the vision you have for them instead of acknowledging them as their own person?
I still like my obsessions. I still let myself fall for fantasies. The only difference between doing so at twenty-four and fourteen is that now I no longer let the delusion devolve into desperation and depression when I realize that my version of their reality is different from theirs. If anything, I dive head first into the fantasy knowing it and not caring.
Because isn’t that what fantasies are for anyway?
An escape from reality.
But then again, if you’re me, it might be more a parallel reality than anything.
PSA: Yes, sometimes your heart skips a beat for the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong circumstances and who is probably in a very inappropriate age bracket (higher than mine, not lower) even by today’s conventions (or maybe even more so by today’s conventions), and that’s okay.
Feelings and thoughts are not actions; Freud is long gone.
The other difference between being twenty-four and fourteen— well, at least for me anyway —is that I’ve effectively stopped giving a fuck about what’s practical, what’s possible, and why if all it is is a fantasy. Passion and peace can, in fact, coexist if you let them.
