Was this a normal way to feel about someone?

14% Normal
4 Comments

This will probably be a lengthy post, but there’s a lot I need to get off my chest. In high school I was friends with a girl, who I developed a crush on. Even though she dated other boys and never returned my affections, I really liked her, but it got to a point where it became an obsession. She was like a real life Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she had so much in common with me, plus she had this aura of innocence about her (which her short stature helped) and I thought she was the perfect girl. This lead me to be somewhat overprotective over her, and I became increasingly paranoid. My school’s insistence on reminding us how dangerous driving could be made me horrified when this girl started driving, and it only got worse from there.

As you can probably tell, I really put this girl on a pedestal, which made me feel especially hurt whenever I saw her do something I might have taken personal offene to. But I have a pretty morbid mind, and for some reason I felt like if I imagined someone experiencing something horrible (mainly car accidents in this scenario), that it could cause that to happen in real life (and it definitely didn’t help that this girl had mentioned numerous times that she wasn’t good at driving). It was my absolute worst fear that this girl could meet a gruesome end, that this beautiful, innocent (at least in my mind) childlike girl could somehow be killed in a gory way.

Perhaps I just have a worrisome personality, and while I haven’t seen her in the nearly two years since we graduated, my ocd was so persistent that these thoughts still come into my head from time to time. But this opens up a much broader discussion: no matter what, this girl, along with everyone else that I know and love, will eventually die some day, and while this may be superficial, their physical appearance will have to fade away too. I’ve always been interested in cryogenic freezing, and embalming similar to what happened to Vladimir Lenin, but the fact of the matter is, regardless of what you decide to do with your loved ones’ remains after death, it’s a rather unpleasant thought when you realize what it really means.

Is It healthy to think this way? Do I worry too much? Is It sweet that I care this much, or am I just a creepy stalker with an unhealthy obsession with what happens to the dead? Writing this was a form of therapy, and I’ll be happy to read your responses.

Voting Results
14% Normal
Based on 14 votes (2 yes)
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Comments ( 4 )
  • RoseIsabella
    4 years ago

    I think you are being way to obsessive about this person. I think you should google mindfulness, and start trying to live in the present instead of in this dreamworld you have created for yourself.

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    • McBean
      4 years ago

      Good advice. As a contingency, I would suggest that if mindfulness is too difficult, the OP could live here in the cyber world of IIN. I think our site is like a dream world, except there is a group ethos that regulates things like circular logic, conflicting intuitions, and stuff.

      Please reply if you think my idea for the OP is not helpful.

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  • sickboy42
    4 years ago

    First of all: I voted "not normal", not because any of this makes you creepy, but because, generally, most people don't experience this sort of thing. I don't have ocd, but I do experience anxiety and, by extension, intrusive thoughts. Some days, I only get one or two, other days it seems like I have one every other moment. The thoughts themselves range from stupid and nonsensical to vividly gruesome scenes like what you described. And, like you, these more gruesome scenarios tend to be about the people I consider special or "sacred" to me. I know I already said this already, but there was a time when I really needed to hear it, and someone reading this might need it as well: Whatever intrusive thoughts and morbid fixations you have, they don't make you creepy, and they don't make you less of a good person.
    The fact that you agonize over this sort of thing indicates to me that you care a lot about the people around you. That being said, it's better for your mental health if you try to avoid going down the rabbithole too often. I know from experience that it's really tiring to police your own thoughts all day, but I also know from experience that if you let yourself get carried away by the same anxious train of thought too often, it can get reinforced in your mind and slip through more and more frequently (rambling personal anecdote: in sophomore year, I struggled with a lot of self-loathing, and my intrusive thoughts reflected that. Over time, I formed a subconscious habit of repeating these hurtful things to myself as a way to kind of avoid reality. It got to the point where I would do something inconsequential like drop my pencil, and my brain would automatically respond with "You are an asshole and a terrible person", and this wouldn't even register to me as being unusual or significant). The way I've learned to manage it is, rather than just internally screaming at my brain to shut up like I used to, I'll try to just...let go of it, if that makes sense. Like, whatever the thought is, I'll literally imagine myself sort of...dropping it on the ground and walking away. It also helps me to think, "I don't need to be thinking about this right now. This isn't helpful." or something to that effect.
    I really hope some of this is helpful or at least meaningful to you in some way! I'm sorry for rambling on about myself for so long.

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  • Grunewald
    4 years ago

    I do that too, but over older women. I might have been Manic Pixie Dream Girl to a handful of them. I am also a bit of a deathling (are you a Caitlin Doughty fan by any chance? I am ADDICTED to her 'Ask a Mortician' YouTube channel. She has done videos on both cryonics and Lenin's corpse...)

    I adore a woman who is about my mother's age. I don't want to have a sexual relationship with her. Just a very intimate, exclusive friendship. A kinship-friendship. The kind you'd want to seal with a vow or a contract, like an adoption, or a marriage, or a named godparent on a baptism certificate. Alas, there isn't a word or a concept for it in Anglo-European-American culture.

    I want to be in every part of her life and shower her with cuddles, and for us to share our souls with each other. I would love to co-sleep in her arms, close and warm, and share secrets. I want to bury myself in her chest. I want her to call me 'habibi' like she calls her children and her husband, and I will call her 'Mammina', as her childen do. I want to kneel in chapel in prayer with her and blaze with the Spirit of God together. I want to snuggle on the couch with her and watch opera. I want her to kiss my forehead, stroke my hair, remind me that she loves me every day and hold my hand as we walk together. If she should kiss my lips, it would be with the affection and purity that my grandmother used to have, when she was still alive. If, as we snuggle under the covers, my lips should meet her breast, it would be as a vulnerable nursing infant.

    I didn't get to feel this kind of 'safe' when I was the appropriate age for it... but this woman reaches into me, past my adult shell, and touches my inner child, and I let myself be carried along by some futile hope that the emotional holes in that childhood heart might yet be filled by her. They won't be. People can reach through layers of growth, but they can't reach back in time. Only God can do that. What I missed, I missed.

    Could this be anything like how you feel?

    I look at her picture every day, re-listen to my favourite voice messages from her, check WhatsApp every 3 or 4 hours to see when she was last online, wondering whom she must be messaging that isn't me, and what she must be sharing with them that she isn't sharing with me. When we were work colleagues, I used to organise where I worked around where she was likely to be, based on her schedule (I ultimately decided to avoid her. The disappointment of not bumping into her when I had hoped to was too intensely painful to allow me to do any work at all). You are no more stalkerish than me, my dear... It isn't normal but I don't think it's dangerous, unless you stop holding yourself back. Recognise that there are kinds of desire that spring from dysfunction, promising falsely to heal that dysfunction and feeding off that dysfunction at the same time to stay alive. Heal the dysfunction by other means and the desire (should) be starved off. Bind yourself to the thing you desire... it follows that you'd be binding yourself to your dysfunction that it feeds off. Is that what's going to help you in the long run? That's my homespun theory, anyway...

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