The Underbelly of Obsessive Thinking

Here's something I have known about myself for decades, and it trips me up every time.

When I do something to someone that hurts their feelings, I get concerned. This is natural, of course. I worry I could have done it better, found a way to make it less hurtful (yes, I am, after all, a Midwestern woman), or avoided hurting them altogether.

Then it gets complicated. Turns into obsessing. Quickly.
From this point on, my thinking contorts into a manifold, manifested obsession. It's a bit hard to track, seeing as how it is so complex and a bit dark and full of shame/blame, but it looks something like this, with all these thoughts turning and churning over each other in no particular order:

Seen Reading

From Kensington Market, Toronto

I am late into the game on this one, but in Toronto this last weekend, in an independent bookstore/tsotchke shop in Kensington Market called Good Egg, I found a book called Seen Reading by Julie Wilson. It's a lovely collection, with a beautiful pressed cover and tiny micro-fictions (one of my favorite genres) about people she's seen reading on "The Rocket" (Toronto subway). She lists what they are reading and what they look like on one page, then her little fiction on the facing page. I ate it up on the plane ride from Toronto to Chicago, and then wrote some of my own.

I was especially interested in making up what I think these women were thinking about. Julie Wilson makes third person stories, and speaks to their lives outside the circumstance she sees them in. For me, I was curious, in a Wings of Desire/angels listening in to human minds kind of way, about piecing together the "clues" I saw and coming up with possible thoughts. I make no claims to accuracy and likely my little stories are projections. But good exercises in compassion...Here are two: