The Invisible String

jiefouli
5 min readSep 22, 2020

I overthink.

When I admit this personal habit to others, they always say the same thing: “Careful, overthinking kills.”

I overthink everything, especially on the people who have no connection to me. Strangers. Sometimes, I witness an interaction between two people and I find one of the two really attracted me in the way they act, behave, and speak. Maybe it is their friendliness; maybe it is the way they choose their words. Whatever it is, once I’m hooked with the idea of that person, I would already had created a bias onto them regardless of whether the idea construed was an accurate representation of their real selves.

The devil is in the details. It’s not the interaction itself that warrants my attention and liking, it usually is just one specific feature. How odd. It can be something as petty as thinking the concerned person as intimidatingly attractive, good-looking. Or it could be that they were talking about some hobby they were passionate in but the way they conversate on the subject matter refrains you from taking your eyes and ears away from them.

This kind of overthinking is not to be mistaken as having an opinion on a person. Opinions are subject to change due to external pressure and self-motivation or some quest for righteousness. Ideas you formed on people you see are fixed concepts. It cannot be swayed. You either validate the idea or have it collapsed in structure.

An example of validation is when you deconstruct your memories of a certain relationship with a person to create your own narrative of the relationship. You take bits and pieces from separate occasions and glue them into one, but you do all that according to the idea you already have in mind. If you already feel that the person you are thinking of is a kind and selfless being, you tend to forgive and push aside the times he could have done better. Instead, all you have is a mass of memories forming the impression that upholds the description in your head. People forget things all the time so they muscle every nerve in their brain to keep precious experiences and stories intact, by adding parts and even segments from other memories to bring the experience back to its apparent whole. More specifically, it is to keep the idea of a person or event in one piece.

The idea of a person concretes and materializes in the mind. Soon, you relate that particular individual to your idea of him/her. It becomes a fantasy. They become people who you think they think they are. Whether that idea is sufficient to represent them as an intricate individual is arguable but because I am not brave to say otherwise, I resort to giving the benefit of the doubt. I will always say that the one idea cannot be defining of an entire person. That idea can be accurate in terms of the situation and the when-s or where-s the parties were in. Nevertheless, when you try to fit the concept you have made up of the person in random scenarios and subsequently predict what that person would do based on your one and only idea of that person, the results can deviate in realness.

However, I have come across people who I have never met or talked in real life yet have a fair conception of who they are. More often than not, they prove faithful to the imaginary impression I casted onto them. Time to time, I would come back with my hypothesis of what they like and how they will react proven to be roughly correct. That is because in whatever they do, they run like the wind and I don’t need to tell you or myself how fast the wind is. I simply have to say ‘fast’ and that would quench my thirst for mental satisfaction.

Overthinking, especially in this context of social relationships is no doubt troubling. While validating your created concept of a person may at times be fulfilling, when your idea of a person gets demolished, it can be crushing to your integrity and confidence. When it comes to strangers that you meet once and never encounter again, the consequence of your idea of the person being contradicted by some incident is little too inconsequential. However, when your idea is on a friend, enemy or a person you would come to regularly run into, care must be taken to not let the mind run unchecked.

It can be frustrating to see someone you hate, do something good when you had a strong suspicion that he would not do such a thing in the very first place. It can also be upsetting when your trustworthy close friend fell down to levels so low, you question whether they are the same person you came to know in the very beginning. This could be why people who overthink tend to have attachment issues: they are afraid to commit or they stick for too long. When people upset them, they can only find themselves to blame in the end for the distress and agitation they are in. Blame in turn creates doubt, a hesitation to act or decide for yourself.

It all comes down to one thing: managing expectations. I deal with this weird habit of mine by letting my mind run loose when I go out to do people watching. I observe people whenever I go to cafes or quiet places to read. I find it gratifying to unleash my creativity towards the unknown sea of people, playing something like ‘dollhouse’ with them in my head. When reality kicks back in, the urge to think about the people I know in real life in a certain way or bias had sunk in intensity.

I still do overthink about people. Occasionally, I am placed in situations where there is no time and space to vent or let out the impulsive yearning to overcomplicate or draw up invented sequence of events. Unfortunately, those times are inevitable.

Still, the few close friends I have, they were the ones who never proved me right or wrong. Because there was no idea or concept of them to begin with. That may be because they were too unique of an individual to categorize them in tight stereotypes or they didn’t give me many windows of opportunities to imagine them in fake scenarios.

There was something else in the works. I call it the invisible string.

Time, curious time
Gave me no compasses, gave me no signs
Were there clues I didn’t see?
And isn’t it just so pretty to think
All along there was some
Invisible string
Tying you to me?

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