Vedha Week 2: Overthinking My Full Time Job
I have somehow turned overthinking into a full-time job.
Someone can text me, "Okay, see you tomorrow," and not even five minutes later I'm analyzing whether the period at the end of their text was aggressive. Another scenario that sends me into a complete frenzy is when, say, you and friend are laughing . All of a sudden, I'll have this invading thought: Are they laughing with me or at me?
I find it very impressive how quickly my brain can turn a completely normal conversation into a full blown investigation. At this point, I might even consider joining the FBI.
The weird thing is that I don't just overthink texts. Sometimes I wonder if other people feel the same way when they interact with me? What if they reread my texts and wonder why I used a specific word? What if they thought I was being rude, when I didn't mean to? What if they replay something I said the same way I replay conversations with others?
Language was created with the intention of making communication easier, but sometimes it creates even more question. Why did they sound like that? Was that supposed to be a joke? Did I sound annoying?
Maybe the problem isn't always what people say, rather everything we add after. The psycho analysis I run in my head, every look, every pause, every syllable that person utters.
We hear someone's words once, but we replay them hundred times. We create meanings that might not even exist. A simple sentence can have ten different meanings to it because of it tone and they way it was said and approximately seventeen reenactments.
I don't think overthinking necessarily means I don't understand the language. Maybe it means I understand how language is always perfect, It has its flaws but at the end of the it gets the job done. Word can be interpreted differently based on who says them, who hears them, the tone and the depending on the given situations.
If communication is difficult to interpret even today, we can only imagine how hard it must have been centuries ago during the stone ages with no specific language. Language not only creates a common ground for understanding but also creates many misunderstandings.
Unfortunately, knowing all of this will not stop me from analyzing almost every interaction I have.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Vedha! I can definitely relate to how you feel as I am also a huge overthinker. More than just overthinking interactions between people, I overthink everything when it comes to my daily life. It’s actually a pretty debilitating problem I need to address. But anyways, I can really relate to how you feel when texting with a person or being around friends, because you never truly know how someone is feeling. I think especially over text, it’s really hard to discern what someone means when they say something or how they may have reacted to your text because you can’t see their face or their body language, or even hear the tone of their voice. Honestly, that’s one of the reasons I really dislike hashing out disagreements over text. It usually just makes things way more complicated because you can’t even fully understand what the other person is saying or what they really mean.
ReplyDeleteI want to point out the question you posed in your blog—whether language makes communication easier or more difficult—and I’m really glad you brought up this point because it’s quite interesting. On one hand, language is able to connect many barriers between people since we all finally share a uniform way of communicating, at least with people within our own regions, but it can also be complicated to decipher many times, and often makes communication more difficult than it should be. But as people, we really have no choice but to communicate and partake in the use of language, so I think we each have a responsibility to try and better ourselves and our understanding of how different people communicate and just try to get on the same page as them. I also think that we have an obligation to be clear and unambiguous in our communication, so that we never leave someone else overthinking and trying to decipher our words. All in all, language is a very difficult thing to decode. However, as we get better and better at understanding and using it, it’ll lead to less overthinking and more balanced thanking.
Initially, I thought your title meant that you already had a full time job and immensely overthinking it. But on further inspection, your blog explains your identity of overthinking very well. You criticize yourself in a very comedical, yet witty, way. I especially appreciate the way you portray your invasive thoughts and your process of overthinking, accentuated with your own real life examples. Using your own narratives, you created a gateway into delving deeper into how communication can cause confusion. To replay a scenario hundreds and thousands of times is similar to how we read our rhetorical annotation analyses over and over again; We can’t seem to derive enough definition from any sort of text. Language and communication is still very difficult to interpret to this day, so give yourself credit for trying to navigate through it. Don’t overthink my response to your blog though! Everything I’ve said is on paper, as is, no other meaning or definition than simply resonating with and complimenting your prose.
ReplyDeleteHi Vedha! Your blog post truly resonated with me; I am a chronic overthinker just like you. Every interaction is an opportunity for my brain to scrutinize everything I say or do. Even to this day, there are some conversations I can still remember verbatim from middle school, and my brain overthinks every word I said every reaction the other person had. For me, overthinking is not limited to my peers—in fact, if my mother says, “Amyra, come here. I need to talk to you,” I will ruminate on every possible (negative) scenario, even if I have not done anything wrong. It is ironic how language was created to simplify communication, yet it often has the opposite effect.
ReplyDeleteHowever, at least conversations utilize tone to provide some indication—texting is where I overthink the most. I am always wondering whether I came across as too dismissive or curt. Every second that I wait for a response is another second that I wait in anticipation of how my text came across.
I agree completely with your conclusion: language is imperfect in the sense that the same word can have a completely different interpretation based on the tone, speaker, audience, and context. I actually saw a TikTok that perfectly summarized this concept: it was a skit about the word “no.” This simple word can vary drastically based on the tone of the speaker’s voice; it could mean anything from disbelief, sympathy, or denial.
Hi Vedha! I found myself relating to your blog a lot as someone who is a chronic overthinker as well. Something that I found especially relatable is overanalyzing my own and other people’s texts; it’s incredibly easy to misinterpret someone’s tone, which is why I generally try to avoid talking about serious topics through text, as well as having a difficult time texting some people because the way they type can come off as uninterested. For example, I sometimes interpret someone’s messages as “let’s end this conversation now” when, in reality, they aren’t trying to convey that at all.
ReplyDeleteI also like that you added how language is supposed to make communicating easier, but instead, brings up a lot more questions. Obviously, language definitely makes communication easier, but I think it’s less about the English language we speak, and more of what we add to it—our tone, nuance, even our facial expressions and body language—that play a part in making things more complicated and at times, create misunderstandings. You described something similar after that section in your blog, that at times, it isn’t exactly what they say, but what is added after that dictates how we receive their message. I also find it interesting that everyone can interpret tone and create meanings that are drastically different from each other; it just goes to show that our overthinking usually isn’t our reality. So, despite our overthinking tendencies, I think we should remember to remind ourselves that what we overanalyze likely isn’t the case! Thank you for sharing your perspective!