#011: Overthinking

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silvi’s note

My beloved readers,

I've gone back and forth about publishing this issue given the recency (and emotional climate) of the US election. As I experience different phases of my own emotions, at moments, publishing seems insensitive. Other times, it just seems irrelevant.

I've decided to send because this issue is about moving past overthinking to reclaim a sense of personal freedom and agency. To recognize the limitations of the mind and stay open to uncertainty. If it can help one person, I'll be glad to have sent it.

If you don’t have the headspace for it today, cast this issue aside for another time :)

Above all, be kind to yourself.

Sending love,
Silvi

the context

I sat slumped on my couch after a late night. It was a wintry morning in 2015. A rare moment of blazing clarity broke through the usual mental chatter. (The volume of the mental chatter turned down due to being tired and hungover.)

I knew I wanted to write.

This was both an exhilarating and fraught realization.

From the prepubescent days of in-class essays, writing had always been a challenge for me. The source of some of my most uncomfortable and tense memories I had as a child. Legs dangling and asleep, I’d stare at a blinking cursor for 8 hours on a Sunday evening. That overworked first sentence felt like stepping into quicksand.

With experience and time (a lot of it), my flow valve for expression somehow widened. On the rare occasion I wrote something I thought was clear and honest, the process unearthed a feeling so uplifting, so rewarding, it was incomparable.

If I could, I'd swim in that feeling forever.

On that Saturday morning in 2015, realizing the depth of my desire to write was immensely energizing. But I needed to know more. Within seconds, I overloaded my mind with questions like:

• What should I be writing about?

• How I could write stuff worth sharing (and do so consistently)?

• How do I create a beautiful website?

• How do I find my audience?

• What's the point of it all? (To get a job as a writer? Write a book? Sell out and monetize???)

Such logically seeming yet impossible questions began smothering my fire. Within minutes, my palpable excitement quickly transformed into frustration, tinged with hopelessness.

Hunched behind my laptop, skimming everything from New Yorker profiles to recipe blogs, I wondered how the hell it was that anyone managed to write anything.

I wouldn't write for another 4 years.

Obviously, the urge to write didn't die. Writing a silly email to a friend or even working on a report requiring some creativity reminded me how electric it felt to express myself, even in the smallest of ways.

But again and again, I’d get pulled into the cycle of overthinking, and my brain would shut it down.

This cycle of overthinking wasn't just for writing. It was my default approach for exploring anything new or unknown.

I'd go to the mind to gain a better understanding of how I could do it or if I even should. Almost always, the mind drew more questions than answers, more resistance than momentum.

Of course, nothing about this process was conscious to me. Fretting about my ideas felt like the most natural thing in the world. Responsible, even.

In reality? My mind (or "intellect") was where my ideas, initially full of passion and curiosity, went to die.

Saddled with so many "ifs" and "buts," I'd eventually hate the way the idea made me feel and, with a sigh, I'd toss it aside.

The idea would disintegrate and sink back into the world of unrealized possibilities.

the shift

I write now.

I haven't fully stopped overthinking (see note above), but I've cut it down by a lot. Enough that I can't connect to the mental tornados I experienced in 2015.

Meditation helps a lot, but underneath the practice is a realization that gives me permission to circumvent my mind, freeing me from self-imposed inertia.

Sometimes, this feels totally crazy to say out loud. Other times, it seems like the most obvious thing I could say on here.

The truth is your mind doesn't know much.

When we want to explore something new and exciting, the default mode for a lot of us is to task (and tax) our brain with impossible questions:

How do I do this, brain? Where do I start? What happens when I try, and it doesn't work? What if it's a total waste of time or energy?

Whether or not we're aware of it, we treat our minds as if they're oracles. The problem here is, when it comes to new experiences, our brains don't have the answers. If they did, we wouldn't have to ask. We'd just do it.

The mind knows some stuff, obviously, but not much outside of its direct experience and random things it heard and learned along the way. Even if it has a guess, it's just approximating. And due to the trillion factors outside of its control, it's probably still off the mark.

Not only that, but the answer to "should I?" or "Is it worth my time?" is totally rigged.

Its goal, above all else, is energy preservation and risk management.

If we ask it how much time or energy something might take, the answer might always be "too much."

It can't even adequately answer why we should do something. The mysterious nudge we get to embark on a new adventure – the spark of potential – transcends the conscious mind and what it can calculate.

What makes something fulfilling, like what we feel inside, or how we might change is inaccessible to the mind.

So if the conscious mind isn't your personal oracle, what is it?

A fancy calculator. Or a half-decent assistant on a good day.

One of the most useful things our thinking brains can do is create space for us to simply show up, suspend any disbelief in the idea (or our ability), and start creating, brainstorming, engaging, exploring, playing, experimenting, and connecting.

This is creating space in the literal sense, like blocking time from 9 AM to 11 AM on a Saturday to start working on a new project.

And creating mental and emotional space... which is just a sly way of asking your judgmental brain to leave the room when you're trying something new.

If something excites you, you don't need to know how to start moving. You don't even need to understand why you should do anything in the first place.

When you drop out of the thinking mind and into the body and your environment, the answers will eventually unfold as you engage with the present moment.

This intelligence, far more expansive and deeper than what we can intellectually grasp, exists outside of the conscious brain.

As you move, the way forward will reveal itself.

So draw the first line. Write the first word. Scribble and stumble. It's part of the dance.

In time, it will make sense, but for now, let yourself move without a concrete plan or purpose.

You don't know, and there's something immensely energizing about accepting that.

Magic is simply what the mind cannot grasp. Make room for it.

love,

Silvi

P.S. Thank you to everyone who’s sent me kind words of encouragement and support, whether through my inbox or survey feedback (or on Instagram!) I cannot overstate how encouraging, heartwarming, and inspiring your messages are. You fuel my fire immensely ❤️‍🔥