FOMO a clue

I wrote this blog back in the beginning of August and something about it made me not want to edit it, as if it was a constant reminder of something in me I didn’t like. At the same time, not getting a closure with my essay made me unable to move on and write something new although I had lots of ideas I wanted to share with you.

Now, pretty much mid-November, I feel about what I wrote about back then as missus blondie felt when she wrote “Clean” about her break up with Harry Styles “Rain came pouring down When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe And by morning Gone was any trace of you, I think I am finally clean

Ten months sober, I must admit Just because you're clean, don't mean you don't miss it Ten months older, I won't give in Now that I'm clean, I'm never gonna risk it”

Now that I do think I am finally clean, I think that is the closure I needed to face my blog again, so here it is “FOMO a clue”, for you, in case you relate, you are not alone, but if you want to change, I assure you it does get better.

Our daily life is full of intricate complex social interactions and unveiled intentions. After not one, or two, deceptions, a crippling debilitating shadow of weakening anxiety glooms over us when we start feeling the need to decrypt and comprehend the spectrum of people’s real thoughts and motives.

In contrast with the fear of missing out on experiences, there is the fear of missing out a clue; the meaning of a glance, of a gesture, of a smile, of a word, the choice of a word, of a text, of the lack of a text, etc, can sometimes create a real disturbance and become a source of discomfort and uneasiness to the human psyche.

A dance between curiosity and apprehension gets even more intense, when around the corner, the need to decode, to seek clarity, to unravel an enigma and become privy with others’ motivations grows even bigger beneath our surface.

About a year ago I mentioned in another blog named “stuck” that I had a fear of missing out and that I felt (or you felt, maybe?) an immense societal pressure to have a life filled with a remarkable routine to match the expectation that younger years of one’s self must brim with adventure and partying, pushing me softly to align my notion of enjoyment to the collective experience.

The essay ends with no real closure, only a realization of how sure I am that things should not be that way only to go back to feeling that way, because in a practical sense, writing an essay doesn’t transform you but getting a message from someone telling you that they feel the same way makes you feel better about yourself while aspiring to do and be better, long term speaking.

Somehow, somewhere, in a hazy moment last year, may be as I was having lunch peacefully while watching Gilmore girls while waiting for my next class, or while enjoying the company of my colouring book in the park or as I read my favourite book during my ride in a bus or a taxi, when the days start off so dark and nightly, people can’t let go of their beds, the streets are empty, I’m drinking hot chocolate milk, it’s rainy and cold and I am wearing my very warm caramel coat, my hair is cooperating excellently, my favourite scarf around my neck, soft pinkish makeup looking impeccable, the sun hasn’t risen yet, the birds haven’t started chanting still, I am enjoying my favourite biscuit at the bus station and no one is around to distract my peace or provoke my alert mode, on my way to my radiology or haematology-oncology rotation, the best I have ever been, the best I have ever felt.

FOMO scattered, I have no idea how, I haven’t really worked on myself or on it as a problem I had to get over, it just did and I couldn’t really give someone any advice about how to overcome it because I cannot really remember the moment it resigned from my life and I cannot seem to recall giving it serious attention to “heal” from it.

I go now through life with open palms, collecting on my way everything I can with my bare hands, trying to let go of a piece of glass that hurts if I find one along the way or if I mistakenly carried it with me on my journey, and from time to time, as I sit to rest from life, I decide that may be it is time to let go of that one thing I gathered along the way so I could have space and time for something new, or something old may be that grew bigger and needs more of and from me than an insignificant fragment of the past.

But somewhere lost in the mist, a buried foggy place in my mind was no longer buried nor foggy, a feeling with no sense of distinctness or clarity was slowly starting to define its traits and establish itself, as if I didn’t already feel too much, a new emotion had to come out of nowhere. The fear of missing out a clue haunts me; it’s a bizarre feeling that hops out of nowhere when you are with family, friends, classmates or a significant other, and as you wait for it to shrink and wrinkle, only were wrinkled your eyes trying to spot the clue you think you would be missing if you didn’t look.

When my classmates looked at each other coincidentally, was it coincidental or was it code for something I said they thought of as stupid?

Was that person just tired or tired of you? And when you told them something bothers you , were they listening and understanding or were they losing their interest as they discovered your oversensitive side? And was the repetitiveness of acts you didn’t like only out of habit of doing them or out of carelessness from their side?

When I went out with my best friend, during the time I was telling her a story, and she checked the time, was it a clue I should have picked up, that she got bored?

And it was okay for my classmates to talk about the thing I said, or for that person to think I am hyper fixated on negative emotions such as anger or vulnerability, and for my best friend to get bored with my story and for my mother to think that I lost weight from my face again and that it didn’t look good on me. All those things were okay and normal and I would not go to victimising myself about some random stupid daily life events that occurred for no specific or valuable reason or else I would be delusional about everything around me in a pathological sense. But the fact that those things were happening and I wasn’t sure if they were happening for some innocent reason or for some reason only the other side knew is what plagued me.

Was the new acquaintance I made genuinely invested in me and the potential of a relationship or were they simply trying to psychoanalyse me, were they really interested in me as a person or were they only saying “interesting” because they saw me as a subject of study.

Was I that important to someone or only a filling to a void as they await something more exciting and fulfilling?

Was that person enjoying talking to me or were they only polite while annoyed, because I only talk to people out of politeness and if I were annoying then I would very much love to stop talking to them for our mutual comfort.

The fear of missing out a clue on people’s real intentions and feelings was lingering with me and there was no way for me to know the truth, and when it was possible for me to know the truth through “communication”, it only left me, most of the times, with more questions, anger and whatever people who don’t communicate feel, with an extra feeling of humiliation to have thought that talking about it would have made me feel better, rather than simply show how crazy or pathetic I were at the moment.

Chasing the whys and making up the what ifs while rethinking the whens and the wheres didn’t really help and just when you think that finding out the absolute truth would help you, it doesn’t. It just makes you even more self-aware and self-conscious about your surroundings.

And when you ask about people’s intentions, you get the “you are always pessimistic” talk, you then learn that may be communication wasn’t the answer to all of your problems, that ignorance is a bliss indeed, but how can one live adopting a simple mind, how can one choose not to know things and how can one willingly opt for “not knowing”, how can anyone choose to blind their eyes on something they could find out more about if they searched or asked more, and as I write the previous paragraph telling you that finding out more about people’s intentions does not help, I myself still cannot help this bad habit of digging more, because I simply cannot figure out how, but I do know that it comes from a place of knowing that I would not forgive myself if I caused myself damage by allowing something or someone into my life, only to find out later that I was clueless about their intention in a moment, I cannot forgive myself for being clueless when there were signs I refused to investigate only to “live the moment”, and I have picked being pessimistic, doubting and insufferable because I don’t do well when the other voice in my head gloats about something it told me was wrong or suspicious and I refused to believe even when my intuition has never failed me before.

I hope some time later, as I was dealing with FOMO last year only for it to magically not matter to me anymore, look back and write about how I one day woke up and realised how silly it was to live imprisoned in what could have been someone’s intention or thought, and that it was okay to not find out everything, to not know everything, to not have to talk about every doubt you had about someone to that someone or someone else and that it is eventually necessary, easy or not, to move on without having to forget or forgive what you have allowed yourself to endure, only because you missed a clue once, it shouldn’t haunt you forever.