That One Thing You Did That Won’t Leave Your Head

The brain grabbed onto something and it won’t let go. It could be anything. A word that came out wrong. A choice that looked bad. A moment that was awkward. Whatever it is, it’s lodged in there and it keeps coming back.

Days pass and it should fade but it doesn’t. The feeling about it stays fresh. The embarrassment stays real. The replaying keeps happening like maybe this time watching it again will make it make sense or make it hurt less. It doesn’t.

During a normal moment it suddenly arrives. During work or lunch or a conversation with someone who has nothing to do with the original thing. The brain decides this is a good time to bring up the past. The feeling of wanting to disappear comes back even though you’re just sitting at a table doing nothing wrong.

Other people don’t think about it. They genuinely forgot or they never cared in the first place. The only person still thinking about it is the person it happened to. The only person suffering from the memory is the person living inside their own head.

The trying to move past it doesn’t work. The trying to stop thinking about it makes it worse. The acceptance that maybe this is just something the brain is going to do doesn’t make it any better either. There’s no winning. The brain wants to replay this and it’s going to replay it.

It will eventually move on. Eventually something else will become the thing that gets replayed endlessly. But right now this is it. This is the thing that matters to the brain even though it doesn’t matter to anyone else. This is the moment that got saved while everything else gets deleted automatically.

You can live with it replaying. People do. They just go through their days with the occasional interruption from their own brain bringing up something mortifying. It’s annoying and it sucks but it’s not actually dangerous. It’s just the brain being annoying.

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