overthinking

madness and sorrow

2 April, 2025 — 3 Comments

Versão em Português.

…”I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
“The different plague of each calamity”
— Constance in King John, Act III, Scene 4

My paternal grandmother passed away last year, on the first of July. My father’s mother, my last grandparent. She took to her grave whatever little energy I had to make it through the rest of 2024. The last time I saw her was two years before, when we said goodbye, before I came to Korea. We took a picture together, which I liked so much at the time, and which I dislike a bit now, because the lighting was not very flattering. But I was hugging her, and it’s one of our sweetest photos. As we drove away, I took a video of her outside the house, making finger hearts and waving goodbye.

I had a call with dad on the weekend after her passing. He told me about the three weeks that she spent under intensive care. It was a Monday night when my aunt called him, and he went running to their house, because grandma had passed out. He had done that several times; she would often run out of breath in the middle of the night, sometimes due to asthma, sometimes due to anxiety. But, this time, it was different, that time. Dad said he knew she wouldn’t recover the moment he got there, and saw her lying on the floor, almost lifeless, as the emergency workers tried to bring her back.

The last time they met was on Sunday, the day before. After my sister and I moved out, visiting grandma helped my parents fill their weekends. He went alone that time; she was in the kitchen, as usual, cooking something delicious (as usual). They talked about a bunch of small things, he nibbled on whatever she was preparing. She was running out of supplements, so he told her he would make sure to buy a new box later that week. On the way home, he passed by a drugstore, and decided to stop and get the supplements, because he wanted her to know that he meant it, when he said he would buy them; he wanted her to know that he really cared. Unbeknownst to all, that was their farewell: a small thoughtful gesture.

Grandma and I texted almost every day. Our last interaction was also on Sunday, the day before she stopped breathing in the middle of the night. It was midnight in Korea, around noon in Brazil. I was exhausted from the week and went to bed at 8, woke up around 11.45, and decided to go for a walk. My head was full of things that I needed to sort out. I wanted to speak with someone, but he was already asleep. I texted another friend, then I replied to my grandma’s “good morning” message. She couldn’t text well so she mostly sent voice notes, and a swarm of stickers, and I always replied back in the same fashion. That night, I only sent one, because I was too distressed. I ended up walking to meet my friend, cried a lot about what was bothering me, and she had to stay over, because I couldn’t stop crying.

Many alternative scenarios run through my mind, as I think about that night. I wonder what could have been different. Maybe grandma and I would have talked more, if I hadn’t been so distracted by the conversation I wanted to have with someone. But maybe I wouldn’t have even replied to her text until it was too late, if I hadn’t decided to leave for a walk. What if he had been up, what if my friend had been asleep. If I wasn’t so tired, from having multiple friends visiting that week. If I hadn’t gone to Austria, where I met those friends. If I hadn’t dated the guy who told me about that project in Austria. If I had stayed home that Thursday night in 2023. If I had passed that scholarship interview in 2022, and gone to a different Master’s program, instead of the one to which I applied the month after. If I hadn’t removed my wisdom tooth right before the interview that I failed. If I hadn’t decided to give this idea of going to graduate school in Korea a shot.

I am an overthinker and I cannot afford to have many regrets. The solution is to always do everything that I feel like I should do, living to the fullest of my heart and conscience at any given time. I trust my ability to put all of my money where my mouth is; some might say that not everything we do requires 100% of us, but I disagree. I am hyperaware of how the small things that happen, the small choices that we make, become the pipes and prisms of much bigger processes and events. Be it the vice of writers, the obsession with connecting parts and chains of events, or my flawed sociological imagination, lost in the predicting of outcomes. In both cases, I am always trying to make sense of the narrative. And this is a dangerous habit, the source of multiple cognitive biases, the reason I can’t afford to go without therapy, but it is also the reason I know that I meant that little sticker I sent to my grandma, with all my heart. I always do.

There is a text that has been occupying my thoughts for months now. I haven’t written it yet, but I have been trying to, for a while. It is loosely about how I feel about life. This is pathetically broad and the reason why it remains unwritten. It feels daunting because it is something I want to write solely to justify myself before the world. I can never get the content right because, at different times, I feel differently about what parts of myself are the most disjointed, most unjustifiable and unacceptable (by me, first, then by others). At the same time, I suspect there is some loose connecting thread linking all of these struggles, hence why I still think about it as One Text that I shall write, one day. Soon, hopefully.

I consider myself lucky whenever I am reminded that living is as much of a beautiful privilege as it is a heavy burden, and that our lack of control over things is the norm, not the exception. It doesn’t always hit as heavily as it does when someone dies, but there are other smaller deaths along the way. My obsession with narratives is challenged by all the ways that life turns out to be anti-climactic. Seeing talented young people die in preventable accidents, seeing elders who aged into poverty and loneliness after a lifetime of love, service and hard work. So many efforts that went unrewarded, unacknowledged, so much love that might as well have gone to waste. There is no way to account for all of the loose ends in the tapestry of living. Maybe that is why I have never hated stories as much as I do now; no amount of perspective, reframing or starting over can account for where I stand.

But I prayed for such a life. A few years ago, when I dedicated my youth to the service of God, I asked Him to freely take me or leave me wherever He pleased, however suited His plans. This meant that my own plans were second to whatever He needed me to do first. It was an open invitation to delays, detours and other inconveniences in the sequence of events I had envisioned for myself. The prayer sounds great when you tell people about it, something to boast about—how selflessly you have given yourself away to the Kingdom of God! It is not so good when events begin to unfold, and you realise you are not fit for the measure of faith you are expected to deploy, to endure season after season stuck where you hadn’t hoped to be. My hopes are desires aren’t geared towards eternity, not as much as I thought they were.

Not all days feel like a failure, though. I am convinced I feel it more often than most, that things were exactly as they were supposed to be—not as a way to rationalise the hurt of not getting what I wanted, but really experiencing that small window of serendipity in which the specific twists and turns that made something possible are so intricate, that it couldn’t be anything other than divine. This can be as little as having a heartfelt conversation with a friend, and realising that moment wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t unemployed (as I am now). In the terms of machine intelligence, this is a small victory of all the reprogramming effort I have taken up. Optimism doesn’t come naturally to me, so I had to build the frame myself. But it is a struggle, and a habit, and I feel less than perseverant these days.

The spiral of regret that followed after my grandmother’s death stemmed from the feeling that I had been counted as unworthy of a proper goodbye, because I was too distracted with unimportant things. On her last day on earth, when she reached out to wish me a good Sunday, my mind was filled with regret from something else, something avoidable, a stupid hurt that I had brought upon myself. Like I was being punished for fixating on my broken heart, something which hardly anyone else thought worthy of so much thinking. This is a downside of certain religious ways of seeing the world—immediately assigning things as blessings or curses, and then just bending the narrative as events unfold, and new consequences come about. Every single thing that went wrong, or not as I expected, in the last two years or so, has felt like a penitence.

Overthinking feeds off cognitive dissonances, sustaining the belief that any turmoil—present, past or future—can be addressed with the right thinking process. Guilt keeps the gears spinning; a misplaced sense of responsibility goes a long way in convincing someone they occupy an extremely powerful and important position, in the grand scheme of related facts and events in a chain reaction. But what did I expect to feel, after the death of a loved one? Blaming myself is one of the natural reactions; madness goes with sorrow where reasons fail to follow.

There is an ideal version of me that is unmoved by circumstances, a machine who never fails to predict what is the best, most optimal micro-decision to be made at all times. I will never measure up because I am a poet, and I was born to play the fool. I miscalculate the costs, pay the full price, reap both the bitter and the sweet fruit. I bear the burden of existing, which is doing things and leaving traces. Maybe there is a deeper, higher aspiration, lurking beneath the things I say when I resent being alive the most, which is to have never existed at all. No body, no sins, no pleasure, no rewards, and no burdens. The ultimate control measure.

Funnily enough, on the other side of all the what-ifs that I can pull out of the pain of grandma’s passing, there a little counter-fact. I was supposed to be going back to Brazil around that time, maybe in late August or mid-September, but I had to delay my graduation—because of the semester I spent going to Austria, because of the chain of events that led to my broken heart. If I hadn’t, she would have passed right before we were scheduled to reunite. I have enough logical thinking and honesty left in me to agree that this would have been somehow worse, all things considered. Assigning a label of blessing or curse to these events is not the point I am trying to make, but this small thought, amidst the sea of possible pathways in my head, did help me sleep at night. A functioning reminder of how little perspective I am capable of conjuring. Peace is not a natural response; it is giving up, and it begets something to be given up, first.

This has been a season of losses, smaller ones, but coming for the same pressure points nonetheless—guilt, regret, resentment. Days when the joy of the small pleasures doesn’t linger. I am coming to terms with my humanity again, in different ways. It’s been nine months since grandma’s passing. I made peace with the goodbye I couldn’t say. Reason is invariably post facto; my mind has cleared a bit, and things turn out to be very simple, as they are. Grandma’s time came, and now she is gone, and this has nothing to do with me and what I think I can control. And I miss her terribly, and I will do so for a long time. It will eventually hurt less, but other things will come and hurt me just the same or worse. Then I will die one day as well. Regardless of the narratives I have told myself about living, there is no different end to the story. Rest in peace, grandma. I am coming to meet you, too.

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

like a polaroid

15 December, 2023 — Leave a comment

I have never hated writing as much as I do these days. I have also never written as much as I have, these days.

Since the end of August, I have started, sketched, completed, abandoned, more than 20 different essays. Most of them will never leave my drafts. Journal entries on Notion, there have been at least 50, without counting my research journal pages, which have been a surprisingly useful outlet these days. There are also over 50 notes on my phone’s Notes app, almost daily random thoughts I write on the Whatsapp group chat with myself, and, lastly, my extensive collection of paper journals, planners and notebooks, and the 9 new ones I purchased within this timeframe. Not to mention the things that never see the outsides of my brain; every single day, I sit in the dark and I write in my mind until everything gets blurry and I fall asleep.

My writings are the shape of my thoughts — according to the season, my most common literary genre will take over my cognitive networks. When I was younger, I saw the world in tales — of fairies, of magical worlds, of mystery and imagination. During my most-active seasons on the internet, I only thought in the shape of tweets; then, there was the phase of inspiring Instagram captions. One of the reasons I gave up poetry was because strophes and certain ways of speaking vaguely (and concisely) stopped making sense in my head. And now, or at least for a while, for a few years now, I have been thinking through essays and papers. I talk to myself by crafting hypothetical long-ass texts that I will never write down. And, even when it’s just me and my mind, my essayist voice is clear and well-positioned to speak to a general, speculative reader, causing me to employ words and construct trains of thought that never mention hard details by name and avoid the heart of the matter that I am at odds with.

It’s as if my consciousness can’t help but sounds ambiguous and act evasive, even when there’s no one there to judge what we have to say. And so, the conversations with myself have become unproductive, in the usual fashion of scientific writings that are full of intricate ways of not really stating something if it sounds like it’s too much. But it’s also worse than that — everything that I write seems terrible to me, by all standards. My academic papers look dull and uninteresting, regardless of what others say. Everything I’ve tried to write for my blogs has sucked, and what did end up getting posted did so under the guise of not missing out on the duty of keeping records of things. In the past, I’ve described writing as mapping out the land and following the lead towards the treasure of the good life (I was very young). At some point, I understood it more like “maze-running” through my mind. Nowadays, I feel like the struggle I’m trying to address with all of this writing is more akin to a labyrinth; no turn is really a dead-end, and reaching the centre is an inevitability, as much as eventually making all the way back, and starting over.

This account may sound positive and almost hopeful, but, right now, it feels tiresome and monotonous as hell. Perhaps this is the reason why I write journal entry after journal entry and I am completely bored of every single one of them — the truth is that having and handling my broken heart are the things I have done the most, as a writer. My fears, my anxieties, none of it is new to me, there is no fresh revelation to make me feel like there is anything worth finding inside when I sit down to write. Unsurprisingly, my brightest moments of clarity lately have come in the shape of confessional text messages I shared with my friends, in our silly little group chats, in between the dozens of things I am supposed to do throughout the day. Writing is, at the core, a very lonely job, and, as a writer, there are worse things you can do than getting out of your head once in a while, not just to go for a walk to stretch the legs and wander around, in typical flaneurian fashion, but to listen to someone else, and give yourself a bit less credit.

At the same time, I’m convinced this isn’t quite the right answer to my current crisis, but I must admit that the correct way out is something that I don’t feel ready to come to terms with. I realised recently that I am terrified of silence. Like an unsettling stranger, someone I don’t know well enough to be comfortable standing in its presence, and who I would never willingly choose to spend any amount of time with. This complicated relationship did not seem as bad as my description sounds now, not until very recently, because I could cut myself some slack by speculating that I would be ok with being silent, until I realised I could not recall the last time I had withstood it, by any measure. It sounds pathetic, which is exactly how I felt when it clocked that, even when I shut my mouth, my brain never shuts up. I have seldom experienced the joy of leaving myself alone.

I am not suggesting that the answer is stopping writing altogether, because, even if I could spend a week or a month without putting words together on paper, I highly doubt that it would be enough to make my brains calm down and leave me be. Like many other times in my life, I have to come to terms with having a problem that cannot be solved, easily or at all, and sitting with the discomfort, tossing and turning without leaving the bed before the dawn. I am restless and I have realised that there is no way of rationalising myself into being at ease, at least not for now, as I grapple with this dramatic identity crisis, and this unexpected, unplanned season, and all the things I am trying to reconcile. Right now, the air feels too cold, my fingers are freezing, my stomach is churning, everything tastes like nausea, my head hurts and time is dragging, moving very slowly, but also so fast, and there is not enough of it for me to do everything that I should do. I feel dizzy and confused and I want to go home, but I can’t, so I won’t. I will stay in, I will haul myself down the end of this day, finish my tasks a lot later than planned, and hope that tomorrow won’t feel this heavy.

This text was meant to be a short entry, a personal challenge to post something that needn’t be a long, comprehensive exploration of all different aspects I have personally considered when thinking about a certain topic, presented in a way that highlights how everything is somehow interconnected, and the absolute historical contingency of facts is the only sure thing in the grand scheme of networks of happenings. I saw this little sentence that Matt Healy said on an interview with the Pitchfork, about The 1975’s 2022 album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language”:

Every record I’ve made, I convinced myself that I had so much to prove, so it had to be about everything that ever happened, everything that’s happening now, and everything that could ever happen,” […] “But on this record, I said, ‘Instead of a magnum opus, what about more like a polaroid?’”

I don’t think this is exactly the format I had in mind when I took this sentence very personally and decided that I, too, should stop trying to prove something to myself & other imaginary someones and just post anything, like I used to, in the past. I don’t think this text here is quite the polaroid yet; to be honest, I would have much preferred to start with an insightful exploration of what the metaphor could mean if we actually took the polaroid more seriously than Matty probably did when he said that. Nevertheless, this is what I had to say, I did it, and this is the best I can do about everything else today.

Additionally, I would like to share that I recently started a simple blog with my friend and labmate Dahyun Ryu, about our research thoughts and theoretical reflections. It’s called sappy sallows and you can access it here. I’ve also added it to the top menu so it’s pretty serious!

Photo by Izzy Gerosa on Unsplash

no filter

24 September, 2023 — Leave a comment

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draught below, as the owners of meadows on Concord River say of the Billerica Dam. Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.” Thoreau’s Journal: 19-Aug-1851

This blog was created in 2011, the month I turned 16 — 24 March 2011, exactly 12 years and 6 months ago, as I write this piece. I was an aspiring illustrator for most of my childhood, but I slowly came to enjoy writing because I liked reading. And I liked reading because I liked wondering, always did, the particular type of thrill that you get out of the potential of spiralling that comes with every move of the freedom of the mind, it has always been a personal favourite. Perhaps because I felt so restrained growing up? I had very little room to exercise the liberties of being myself, except in my head (and then on the internet). Blaming over-controlling parents is the easy way out; deep inside, I think that my mum and dad believed that I could not be trusted with a private world, because I didn’t seem like a child who could be trusted with becoming the person they thought I should be, with the values they thought I should champion.

On the outside, I was a smart, hardworking and polite young girl, but I was disgustingly curious, annoyingly talkative, visibly proud and extremely greedy. I was happy to be rewarded by the systematic benefits of being me, but just as prone to flipping the table and voicing out ambiguous thoughts. I wanted to be respected really badly. I was very selfish, and I had to be intentionally taught to share my things, to think twice, to control the imp of the perverse and be kind, and to love my family. I gave authorities the benefit of doubt and I was the favourite student in every class, but I learned to take it away easily, and provoke conflict where it was due — I remember having discussions with my Bible school teachers as early as 7 years of age. I have clear memories of being asked invasive questions about my inner thoughts, since I was young, both by parents and church leaders. Those who paid attention to what I was saying knew that I was a problem to solve, because I longed for a life of adventures and discoveries that were not aligned with the lifestyle I was expected to cultivate. Unsurprisingly, I was bad at bonding with other kids, to my absolute horror, because I was taught by my favourite TV shows that no amount of hard work matters if you don’t have friends.

The saving grace was that I am, and I have always been, extremely sensitive. At some point of my teenage years, I realised that this was the reason I had developed a sense of empathy and understanding towards others, and a reasonable idea of the type of person I wanted to become. Life had its ways of teaching me about what it meant to have a humble, loving heart. Still, even into my late teens, many horrors persisted. I felt really misunderstood in my curiosity, and the things that I liked, but nothing hurt more than being misunderstood in my sensitivity, especially when I cried. It was not something I could control, but it made people question everything else about me. The thing I hated the most (maybe I still do) was being treated as someone less intelligent due to my sensitivity. The silver living was realising that, when I was open about my struggles, I could form bonds with others, even those with whom I had previously found nothing in common to talk about. Oversharing helped me navigate the struggle of making myself understood, of showing my parents and leaders that there was nothing to worry about, that I wasn’t hiding anything serious. It’s not that hard to understand why — nothing speaks louder, to a believer, than the act of confession; admitting to my faults in a loud voice was the way to convince other of my radical commitment to being truthful. Crying all the time without shame made people question my intelligence, but it never made them question my honesty. And that sounded like a good start.

Becoming a writer gave me power over my thoughts and feelings. The stories I read enabled the freedom to imagine the life that I wanted to live; writing my own gave me full control over the fate of characters that represented different sides of me. Multiple novels were started, but never finished; I lacked the interest to go until the end because, at some point, I would realised I was only writing to make sense of something, not to complete the story. This blog was born out of the need to keep track of what I was doing, and it proved to be the right venue to put out shorter projects, and experience people’s responses to my thoughts and feelings; my poems and short stories articulated the difficult things about how my brain worked. The obsession with details and figuring out how they related to the full picture of things I wanted to understand, the appeal of darkness, the unresolved ambiguity of joy, my simultaneous distrust of and longing for peace.

Making things absurdly clear, even through fiction, was the easiest way out of the constant state of fear that, over the years, accumulated into generalised anxiety. The first miracle was to find out that others felt the same; experiencing that sort of feedback was the closest I had ever been to hope that the struggle of living inside my head could amount to something else, other than stress and late night fights about my inability to come out of my shell and experience the world like the normal person I was supposed to be. Of the many horrible memories I keep, I remember the terrifying, pressing threat of silence. Nothing scares me more than the fear that I cannot chill because, if I don’t always look closely enough, I will blink and miss out on how things are quietly aligning to bring about chaos. And there is so much chaos, there is so much drama, it seems to follow me wherever I go, and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, or if I’m the bad luck myself.

Moving towards essays was a result of the process of moving away from fiction and closer to non-fiction — which, in turn, was a result of the process of moving out of my own shell, and starting to experience the world for myself. To each their own, but, all things considered, I have learned to find real life more appealing than the world of imagination, even when things don’t go as well as I would have plotted them to. Surprisingly, I still read as much poetry as I did before, but I don’t remember the last time I felt comfortable articulating something in a verse form. Maybe because poetry thrives on the things that are left unsaid in-between, and I am desperate to elucidate every single thought that’s plaguing me right now. This is a season, I am sure, but it’s the one in which we have been, for a few years now, overthinking things in their raw state, regurgitating and then taking them in again, exactly as they came. It’s disgusting, and it might not end anytime soon. It surprises me how easily I used to wrap ideas up in a few paragraphs, and now I cannot do without a handful of very long ones, too much contained in each sentence, way too personal not to be uncomfortable unless I make a conscious effort to sound less burdensome.

Why do I do it, then? I mean writing as I do it these days. The second miracle is love; in spite of all the misery, my life is overflowing with love, from all the people in my life who have witnessed the mess of me, every single thing about me which is not likeable, every vulnerability that makes me an easy target to be deemed unloveable. This is where I stand right now, because I am not particularly fond of this season; if I’m being very honest (which I usually am), I don’t publish as much as I used to nowadays because I don’t feel as okay with my unfiltered thoughts, not as I used to. I ran out of some of the brave attitude of writing down things before I had made total sense of the best way to put them out, the right way they made sense together; I hate rereading something and realising I could have said something better if I had waited as little as a day, or a few hours, before deciding to put it out for everyone to read. Not that a lot of people read it, but I like the praise of having said the right thing, and it takes a lot of thought to say even a small thing that could sound right to someone.

This piece started as a simple journal entry to think away the things I was overthinking after my weekly therapy session. I journal three to four times a day these days, and I am writing so much because I am hurting so bad, I lose sleep and I waste precious mental space overthinking every decision and incident that has led me to this moment, and writing the mess down is the only thing that helps. I am thinking about the reasons why I do the things I do, the reasons why I became the person I am, and there are so many other things that I could have said to make this entry make better sense, there are so many sentences that can come across the wrong way if someone is willing to misunderstand what I’m trying to say, and this is precisely the side of me that I hate the most these days — the confusing, verbose, messy, disorganised person that I am without a filter. Like a thunderstorm. One of the biggest illusions I had back when I was just an imaginative child was that, as an adult, I would simply know who I was, once I had the freedom of experimenting more to figure it out. I am not that old, but it’s safe to say that the process has not been as enlightening as I wish it had, at 28 years of age, but I have a lot to be grateful to my habit of registering everything in written form.

When I look back, I experience the anguish of realising I still haven’t moved on from some of the same issues that have been plaguing my stubborn little head. The inner child, the melancholic teenager, the anxious adult, they are all one and the same, every difference between one and the other just makes it more obvious that they all stem from the same self. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s words, that some of us were not born to be forced; I wonder if things would have been easier if I had not been so resolved to breathe after my own fashion. My biggest crime, since I was just a child, has always been the imp of disobedience; for the most of it, I am at peace with being unwise, if that’s the price I pay for doing what I want, what I feel like I can afford doing. And I am still terrified of myself most of the time, because of the losses that come with every choice, because most of them do not seem worth the risk, but I still push some buttons and go for the ride. And then I cry about what’s been lost, I cry myself to sleep, but I will do it again.

If my love for making sense of the details that make up History has taught me anything, it’s that there is no amount of past that could ever convince us not to make the same mistakes when experiencing the world for the first and only time, at every single moment of our life. And it is not that I am making a joke out of God’s Grace, but it’s only that I have seen enough of the world to be assured that there is more than one righteous way of walking down the path of Truth, and I must find the one that’s meant for me. I am nothing but the unreliable narrator of this unfiltered account of a stream of thoughts that might, or might not, go well with the rest of the story that I will not stop telling, not until I’ve figured out the one thing I can’t stop thinking about: how to stop thinking, and go to sleep.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash