Ways of Thinking

The sunset after work disappears so quickly. That is how the days have passed since I started working. No great waves, no clear failures. A whole year just went by like that.

I often feel detached. I am always living somewhere else: in the future, in the past, in imagination, in things that have not happened yet, in things I have replayed again and again. It feels like I am watching myself live.

Sometimes I feel as if my organs of perception are not really working.

In a dazed kind of flow, things happen one by one, and I deal with them one by one, but they never really land on me.

I do not know if this counts as one of my ways of feeling and thinking about things. I also do not know how to switch it off.

I do not know when thinking became a fixed voice inside my head. My thoughts are no longer vague, abstract things drifting by like clouds. They have become words, one after another, flowing through my mind.

It feels like I am constantly talking to myself. The question is, is talking to myself really the same as thinking?

I probably used to assume it was. That voice in my head is always speaking, always explaining, always adding subtitles to whatever is happening.

But because of that, many feelings are translated into language before they even have time to become feelings. Language is powerful, but also sly. It helps me understand myself, and at the same time, it places a layer between me and myself. I feel like I am acting out my own life.

And I am not a very decisive person.

I cannot even clearly say what kind of life I like, or what kind of life I want. Most of the time, I only know what I do not like, what annoys me, what bores me, what makes me want to escape. But if you ask me what I actually want, I cannot say.

Just like now. I have written this feeling down, but I do not know what to write next.

Should I write about things like “building a new order for my life”? I would probably be too lazy to follow through.

What I really want to ask may be this: how can I live in the present again?

A life that repeats itself day after day makes me feel tired of everything. But I am not the kind of person who changes life decisively. I want change. I want something new. But when things actually happen, I often step back again and become a bystander.

I have become a bystander to my own happiness.

When I am happy, I am not happy enough. When I am sad, I am not sad enough. Many emotions seem diluted. They become describable, analyzable, something that can be placed into a sentence, and then they stop feeling so real.

Only when I am angry do I really feel angry.

Maybe it is because anger is too intense. Unlike other emotions, it cannot be slowly explained away. It rushes out directly. The body reacts first: heartbeat, breath, tense fingers. The voice in my head does not even have time to organize it.

That is strange too.

It means I am not without feelings. It is just that many feelings are digested by language before they have time to appear.

Sometimes, maybe the sense of reality is not in the sentence, but in the moment before the sentence appears. It was originally something very concrete, but I turned it into words too quickly.

Words make me feel safe, and they also make me dull. Of course, being a bystander is not entirely bad.

It allows me to stay calm sometimes, without being completely swallowed by what is happening. It lets me notice details, and observe many emotions from a little distance. In that sense, it is quite suitable for being a recorder. To record what happens with words, to record life, to record the moments I have not yet figured out.

Although I have not really written anything in a long time. The last time I wrote intensely, the last time I had that surging desire to write, was probably back in middle school. Back then, I wrote simply because something wanted to come out.

Now, more often than not, I am wrapped in a sense of loss. It feels like writing has also become something very far away.

But maybe writing itself is a way of thinking. Not the rigid kind of thinking where you raise a question, analyze it, and solve it, but the kind where you first set down whatever has flowed through your mind.

I do not know what question I want to think about, and I do not know what answer I need.

I am just like a worker on a word assembly line, moving with probability, fixing in place the words that pass through my mind. Maybe only after they are fixed can I look back and think, oh, so this is what I have been thinking about lately.

Maybe I still cannot fully live in the present for now. But at least I can try, before the words appear, to pause for a little while.