Messy Map of My Mind (speech)
On a piece of paper is hundreds upon hundreds of tiny lines that appear to depict streets. From afar it looks like a fractal or piece of abstract art. But upon a more thorough examination, not a single minute detail was looked over. There are so many lines that if you look at the map for too long, you almost start to get dizzy. Every time you look at the map again, it appears as if there are more lines than the last time. The map is so detailed you have no idea where it is. You examine it over and over and try to figure it out. It looks familiar, but you just can’t quite pinpoint it. You pride yourself in being a persistent person, so you keep investigating. You stare at if for minutes at a time and even attempt to use a magnifying glass. After a while though, it becomes too much and you ask someone else to help you figure it out. It turns out that you were looking just one of 16 sections of a folded map. You were too caught up in the details. You were too zoomed in to see the bigger picture. You overcomplicated it. You overthought it.
This is a common occurrence for someone like myself. I tend to overthink things. For instance, as I’m writing this I’m not sure whether I should have said “I tend to overthink things” or “I have a tendency to overthink things”. And while I wrote that last sentence, I had a 5-second debate in my head about whether I should use “for instance” or “like”. Tend to overthink things – that’s some nice alliteration right there. Oh, and also while brainstorming for this assignment, I overthank…thunk…thinked it. Wait, what’s the past tense for think? I genuinely forgot while writing this, but I figured it out. It’s thought. I overthought it. Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, back to what I was saying. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I overthought about what to write about for this speech assignment. The irony.
I probably also spent way to long practicing this speech because now that I’m here my brain and mouth have probably disconnected and I doubt you can even understand what I’m saying. It probably sounds like gibberish, baloney, or gobbledygook. And I know that even though I practiced this way too much, while giving this speech my brain is struggling to turn these symbols that I’m writing now into audible sounds. Have you ever thought about how wild it is that we can do that? Like putting thoughts into words is so easy, yet so difficult at the same time. Consciousness is such a weird concept.
Sometimes, I feel like me and my brain are separate things. One and another. If I saw my brain walking on the street, I’d probably recognize, but I wouldn’t be able to identify who it was. I’d like to think that I am in control of my thoughts, but it’s probably heavily unbalanced in the other direction. I’d call myself the owner of my overactive imagination. That about sums up our relationship.
You know how some people say that things are “organized messes”. Well, you could say that about my mind except it’s 99 percent mess and 1 percent organized. And that feeling of disorganization causes my mind to want to malfunction and so there goes the 1 percent of organization. My brain has too many tabs open. I often find myself thinking about the same things. Like instead of reoccurring dreams, I have reoccurring thoughts. My thought patterns retrace their own steps. I go off on so many insane thought tangents that I come back to the same tangent.
Right about now, approximately two and a half minutes into this speech, you might be asking yourself, “why does any of this matter” or “what does this all mean?” You have been ranting about how you think too much or think you think too much for far too long now. Well, to answer to the first question, it doesn’t this is just an example of one of many tangents that my mind has chosen to entertain. As for what this all means, there are serious benefits and drawbacks to having an overactive mind.
Benefits include increased creativity, cool, vivid dreams, and a certain willingness to entertain any idea. On occasion, I’ll come up with a good idea, however, it’s more likely that it’ll get lost in the all the thoughts that make up the mess which is my mind. Perhaps, though, I’ll have and remember an idea that will lead to a cure for cancer, or bring about positive change some other way. Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking, more like wishful overthinking.
On the other hand, having an overactive mind can be really frustrating and counterproductive. It takes me forever to complete almost any task. So, please give me short deadlines or else I will find a way to drag it out so that it takes me the whole time to complete something. Additionally, this tendency to overthink things is most prevalent when I’m trying to fall asleep, especially on a school night. The problem is I’m thinking so much about trying to fall asleep that I can’t. The number of scenarios I play out in my head that don’t actually happen is infinite. Scary movies are definite no because I know I’ll be up all night and probably the next night thinking about them. When I was in third grade, an episode of My Babysitter’s A Vampire, A DISNEY SHOW, kept me up for a solid six hours. Basically, mind is probably its most active when and on topics where it’s least necessary. I don’t even know what I’m thinking about half the time.
In all honesty, I really struggled to find a good way to end this speech. I thought about a creative, intriguing, and thought provoking ending for days and this is all I could think of. I can assure you I had a really great idea for an ending, but it got lost in my mind map. Hopefully yours can zoom out, look at the bigger picture and find some meaning in all of this, something I have a difficult time doing.