on the unbearable weight of my own mind

there are days my brain feels too loud for my body. like i’m trying to live inside a house where every room is echoing with unfinished thoughts. even in stillness, my mind gallops. no moment is ever quiet. everything has a subtext, a second guess, a spiral. it’s not just that i overthink, it’s that i exist in overthought. it is the language my brain speaks most fluently.

i think i learned early that being smart was my value. i was the girl who knew too much too young, who found safety in words, in books, in analysis. but when intellect becomes your armor, it also becomes your cage. i dissect everything: emotions, people, sentences, myself. especially myself. i don’t just feel sadness; i write essays in my head about why i feel it. i don’t just experience love; i analyze its patterns, its risks, its historical weight. nothing is just what it is.

and god, it’s exhausting. i wish i could just be sometimes. i envy people who can exist on the surface, who don’t drown in depth. who can feel without narrating it, cry without needing to know the psychological reason why. i envy the ease of not knowing. of not needing to know. i envy the ignorance that looks like peace.

there’s a kind of madness in this hyper-awareness. a quiet, constant hum of being too present. it’s not always visible, i still smile, function, reply to messages. but underneath, there’s a cognitive fatigue that no one sees. like my mind is a browser with fifty tabs open, and not a single one can be closed. and i don’t know who i’d be without this weight. without the constant internal monologue, the analysis, the ache of trying to understand.

i’ve romanticized it, i won’t lie. i’ve looked at woolf and plath and all the brilliant women who thought too much and died too young. there’s a dark glamor in being the girl with a fragile mind and a fierce vocabulary. a temptation in letting the pain become the art. but i also know: this is not beautiful when you’re living it. this is not poetry when your body is heavy with exhaustion from simply thinking.

i’m trying to learn how to rest. how to not feel guilty for turning my brain off, even for a second. how to find value in softness, in not knowing, in being. i want to believe that i am not only as worthy as my thoughts. that there is a self underneath all the spirals. that i don’t have to carry the entire weight of my mind to be real.

but the truth is, this weight has shaped me. it’s given me language, empathy, a way of seeing the world that is deep and strange and tender. it’s made me lonely, but it’s also made me kind. it’s made me tired, but it’s also made me write.

and maybe that’s the paradox, the mind that exhausts you is the same mind that saves you.

some takeaways, or gentle reminders:

• thinking deeply is a gift, but you are allowed to rest.

• you are not broken for feeling too much or analyzing too often.

• stillness is not laziness. silence is not failure.

• you are more than your thoughts. you are allowed to just be.