Turning Tides into Strides

Olinda Braganza posted under OlindaQuillsIt on 2019-09-03

Many times, we find our minds enveloped in nightmares, questioning our self worth and even wondering whether whatever efforts we make are worth it. Many times, we often want to escape to something better and to start anew. But, what if we cannot? I have often found myself feeling positive and yet, I have found myself facing and listening to my dark thoughts even if I did not want to. Small thoughts led to shady interpretations and shady interpretations led to something that many fall victim too, including me - overthinking. I started creating inaginary impossible, negative scenarios in my head, trying my best to balance the circumstances created at the hands of my choices. Initially, I let that affect me, but as I grew up, I learned to accept the flaw of my hubris, which had rendered these made-up scenarios useless and I did not know what to do with them. So, something quirky turned up inside my churned-up brain. What if, I could use the supressed energy that my overthinking contained and converted it into literary scenarios? At first, I simply replaced the names of the people in my imaginary scenarios and wrote them down exactly as I had imagined it. As soon as I had written them down, I had another revelation. My characters were flawed, because my thought process was. Slowly and steadily, my years of reading and observations during meagre social interactions pointed them out to me and I modified the actions of my characters to fit the narrative, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, and so did the story. This method not only gave me insight about human behaviour but also gave me a glimpse of what I had wanted to convey through the stories that I had penned. I had found my personal theme to write stories. I did not want them to be perfect. I want them to feel relatable to the very first reader. Me. Over time, whenever I would begin to overthink, I trained my mind to stop and breathe, while thinking of the scenario that I had created in my mind and wasted no time in noting down the scenario that I had created, in a diary, and would work towards creating that into a story, whenever the time was right. And that helped me in converting my destructive thoughts into productive ones as well as give me a confidence boost to take the first step to share my art with others. In the end, I learned a valuable lesson: It is never about razing my capabilities to fit the darkness of my overthinking, but to beat my overthinking to raise my capabilities of what I could become inspite of it. And to me, that was what art was all about. ______________ ___________________