I Overthought Everything. But Never My Life
The question that changed everything.
I thought I had an overthinking problem.
Every night I’d replay conversations.
Worry about the future.
Analyze every decision.
Every tiny mistake.
But after years of overthinking...
I realized there was one thing I almost never questioned.
My life.
Every time I’m talking to someone outside, I constantly think about what I’m saying.
What do they think about me?
Am I speaking the right way?
What should I say next?
The night of that day, I lay in bed wondering.
Did I speak the right way?
What did they think of me?
It feels like 2 minutes,
I check my phone,
one hour has passed.
I’m thinking about my past, what did I do wrong?
I’m thinking about plans, how do I pick the right thing?
I’m thinking about sleeping, but because I can’t stop thinking about sleeping. I end up not sleeping.
Why can’t I just stop thinking for a minute and sleep?
I spent thousands of hours thinking.
But almost none of them changed my life.
I wasn’t living my life.
I was rehearsing it.
…
I worried about what people thought.
I worried about which high school to choose.
I worried about which career would be the right one.
I thought every decision would determine the rest of my life.
…
Then one day...
I stopped asking...
Which school should I choose?
And started asking...
What kind of life do I actually want?
…
Everybody is going the same path which is high school.
But I’m thinking about my mother whose exhausted from working every day.
Coming from work with a bad back.
Smiling despite the drowsy face.
Trying her best to support me and my sister.
Every day looked the same.
She never complained.
So I made a decision.
For the first time...
I wasn’t choosing between schools.
I was choosing between lives.
So I took a year off to focus on YouTube.
School wasn’t going to get me there fast enough.
I still overthought everything.
Did I make the biggest mistake of my life?
Should I have stayed in school?
Was I wasting a year?
Then I start noticing something.
I’m still overthinking.
But the questions were different.
My mind wasn’t only thinking about fear anymore.
It was thinking about building something.
I still couldn’t sleep.
But now I was thinking about tomorrows video.
Better ideas.
Better thumbnails.
The same mind that used to keep me stuck.
was helping me build something new.
For the first time.
I stopped rehearsing different versions of my life.
And I started living one.
Years later.
My mother comes home one day
and I tell her.
That she doesn’t have to work.
She looks at me and says…
Are you serious?!
Thank you.
I’ve never been more happy than when I heard those words.
In that moment...
I realized every hour I had spent building something had been worth it.
For years I asked...
What do people think of me?
Did I say something wrong?
What if I fail?
And none of those questions changed my life.
Then one day...
I asked a different question.
What kind of life do I actually want?
That question changed everything.
My overthinking never disappeared.
It finally had somewhere meaningful to go.