Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts

Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts

    It's Not as Easy as it Sounds

"Turtles all the Way Down" by John Green focuses on Aza, a girl whose biggest obstacles in life involve her own thoughts. To someone who cannot relate to her situation, you may be left feeling confused by how someone could allow their thoughts to dictate their life. On the other hand, if you're more like me, you understand just how much power an uncontrolled spiral of thoughts can have over you.

Starting late in my junior year in high school I began to be hounded on a near daily basis about how important it was for me to get my driving permit, sign up for drivers-ed, and start doing my driving hours so I could get my license. While most people were excited by the idea of driving and thought of all the freedom they would get from it, my first thoughts were of nothing but paralyzing fear.

Afraid of what, you may ask? Being a bad driver? Crashing? Well, sort of but not exactly. I was afraid of what being behind the wheel made me capable of. Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to I could just run over a pedestrian. Technically, anyone driving a car could but it terrified me that I thought of that as a possibility and therefore it was in my mind when I was driving. I didn't have a motivation or will to run anyone over, I swear I'm not that kind of crazy. It's quite the opposite actually. I focused on that thought because I so badly did not want to do it but because I so badly did not want to do it, I couldn't help but think of it every time I even thought about driving a car.

The thoughts don't stop there either. If you have intrusive thoughts about this, you don't only picture yourself hitting someone, but the terrifying aftermath of it: getting out of the car and seeing a dead body, being arrested, being questioned as to why you did what you did, and not being able to explain why you did what you did because the truth is that you didn't want to do it at all.

The truth is, you can't control whether or not you have intrusive thoughts. You can only control whether or not you change your life to accommodate them or do what you want in spite of them. At the end of the day thoughts are only thoughts and they have no real physical control over you. They can be terrifying and hard to love with but the first step to overcoming them is recognizing that they are truly powerless when you have no desire to do the actions they ask of you.