I Was Wrong
Yesterday I wrote the following:
“Now I just need to work on some other problems I have, such as … my obsessive need to have everything make sense so that I can give it a label and fit it into one category or another.”
I was wrong to say that. The part about labeling things might be true, but not my need to have everything make sense.
That’s just me. It is part of my hard-won identity.
I am also wrong to label it as an obsession. That’s also just me, making yet another preemptive strike against that imaginary critic, the one who is going to be putting that label on me and what I do and putting me into the “bad” category. It’s been done before. Often it goes along with the label “crazy stalker.” Or comes in the form of someone saying to me, “Don’t read so much into everything."
Sigmund Freud is credited with saying "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Maybe so, but I need to know what kind of tobacco went into it before I smoke it.
It is not enough for me to just accept that I feel something, especially when that feeling is intense. No, not just intense, but a raging fire that consumes everything in its path. I have to find the common threads. The patterns. I need it to make sense.
Therefore, what I should have said was, “Now I just need to work on some other problems I have, such as … my obsessive need to apologize for being who I am and the fact that I need to have everything make sense.”
Oops. My bad.
