When does obsession make you boring?
its four in the afternoon and my head hurts. i’ve got an addiction to (…) speculoos and have been eating a discounted pack of them like i’ve just come off a fast. i think my weekend of no-appetite-anxiety-something has finally caught up with me. anyways, i’ve been listening to the song “laid” by james, which i genuinely forget exists every few months. then, like clockwork, i’ll remember its existence and it will be my most listened to song on spotify til i inevitably tire of it, and the cycle continues.
specifically, the lyrics in the second verse speak to me:
my therapist says not to see you no more
she says you’re like a disease without any cure
she said i’m so obsessed that i’m becoming a bore
sorry i got distracted by this wonderful video of a woman in heels rolling a crystal ball between some ribbons. it is probably fetish content but it gave me a bit of asmr and now i’m thinking more about ribbons than of song lyrics. but i digress……
does being overly obsessed make you boring, in general? yes! i think it really does. to be the one being obsessed, wether that be with a concept, a goal, a person, it feels hellish. like you’re in this horrible cardboard tube, and the other end is all you can see. everything else blurs into this soft brown and you’re ridiculous, you’re obsessed. all matter of common sense goes out the window and you are singular, completely reduced. sometimes it feels magical, like adrenaline-gasoline lit on fire in your ribs, at least for me. it has me pacing up and down the alleyway by my apartment, chain-smoking and laughing out loud while nobody is around. day-drinking and writing forty page diary entries until there are hard red blisters on my fingers. the actual concept doesn’t even matter, it is simply my mind that finds something to grasp onto and it becomes the most important thing in the entire world. i slammed my head into a wooden door the other day while staring at someone. they asked if i was okay. i was confused. i didn’t even notice i had hurt myself.
all this to say… obsession feels like the best and worst thing. to bring in an example that won’t involve me (i’m trying to remain somewhat humiliation free today) let us think about beth harmon from the queen’s gambit. i haven’t watched the show or read the book since i was in eighth grade, but from what i can recall it was exactly her obsession that made her both so interesting and boring to the rest of the world. when you devote yourself completely to something, so completely that your life ceases (i just tried to spell that like caeser, what the hell) to matter in lieu of it, you become a concept yourself. harmon was the very best, but her life had no meaning outside of chess for most of the series. when chess wasn’t feasible, life wasn’t feasible for her. of course this is a somewhat extreme example, as to be so devoted to one thing for so long is a very different kind of obsession than what i experience.
i, rather, go through awful phases. and so i don’t have much to show for it, when i look back. i’m not beth harmon or that guy from whiplash (i’m assuming thats a good example, i haven’t seen the movie) and my neurosis does not make me money or make my life richer. well, perhaps it makes my life richer. but it dulls my conversations and gives me headaches and my fingers are killing me.
so when does obsession make you boring?? i think, once you realize you cannot live without it. i feel i cannot be happy until i am miserable. i must go wild over something or i can’t get up in the morning.