The Art of Fixation

fixation [fɪkˈseɪʃən]

(n) noun

1. the act of fixing or the state of being fixed

2. a preoccupation or obsession

(thanks freedictionary.com!)

You know how you can be just laying around or just doing something that doesn't require much thought and you just have one of those "Ah-ha!" moments?  Well, that happened to me a couple of days ago.  I was laying in the bed planning out what I was going to wear to work, when I had my Ah ha! moment.  Backstory: There's a guy that I started hanging out with again, and I thought that I was really starting to like him...a lot.  (Don't get me wrong...I do like spending time with him and hanging out, but I don't think that I like him as much as I thought that I did).  When I shared this information with a friend of mine, she warned me to slow my roll.  And I was successfully doing this until something awful and unexpected happened...a friend of mine was killed by LAPD.  Now, this guy and I weren't buddy-buddy, but we had a good "check-in" type of friendship (We would check in with each other every couple of months to make sure that we were doing okay) and I was just thinking about him earlier that week.  I was thinking that I needed to call him to see how the new year was going.  I thought about contacting him for a whole week until I got a text message about his untimely death.  I'm a very sensitive person, so even though we didn't have this strong friendship, I still kept thinking about the situation and him constantly.  So you can guess what happened...whenever I felt myself starting to think about my friend, I would immediately change my thoughts to "NBO" guy (New, but old).  So for the past week and a half I was thinking that I really liked NBO, but in reality I developed this fixation of NBO because that was my coping mechanism. Even though this helped me deal with the death (meaning not staying up till 5 am thinking about it), it started to become a problem with confusing my feeling for NBO.  I knew/know that I was interested, but it was hard to gauge my level of interest. 

When I was laying in the bed, it hit me that I have been doing this for a while.  This wasn't the first incident that I used something that was semi-positive to cope with something that wasn't so positive that was going on in my life...and that's not fair to me or to that person.  Because of this fixation, I developed (unfair) expectations, which lead to me being frustrated, which lead to me cutting some unsuspecting man off. Well, this time I've "slowed my roll" and I've just been taking it one day at a time.  Although I'm not sure exactly how I feel about NBO, I do know that I enjoy hanging out with him and that's just fine with me.

Bright Side:  I'm hoping that learning this new thing about myself will aid in me overthinking something else help me to take it slow and deal with the things going on in my life individually, and not using one to get over another.  See...I'm learning a lot more about myself.