Obsession

I have to admit to being borderline obsessive. Perhaps it’s an age thing but apparently I am getting worse. I find it very easy to start things yet very hard to stop them. 

Take my obsession with Duo Lingo, for example, which I usually enjoy. I find the mental challenge of learning a language, or several languages, fascinating as well as stimulating and I am on a 3,216 day streak. That is nearly 9 years of doing at least one lesson on the app every day. So, that’s 8 Christmas days, 8 New Year’s days, 8 birthdays, through rain, shine, illness (even in hospital) and the myriad of other things that I have contended with.

I’ve thought about stopping yet the thought of it fills me with dread. Someone (who?) makes me keep going. I have somehow convinced myself that Duo Lingo is part of who I am and should I stop, so will my very existence.

It has been the same with work. Stopping work has never been about bringing the daily grind to an end but about becoming someone else. I work therefore I am. I use Duo Lingo therefore I continue to exist. Perhaps I am frightened of what lies beyond?

In many ways writing this blog has been the same. It is twelve years since I started it yet here I am, writing again. Gradually I am weaning myself off it, as well as work and am down to one day a week for both. Who am I kidding? I have managed to come off Twitter though.

I have a string of other, lesser, obsessions which make up who I think I am. I feel as if I take them on to justify my existence yet I know this is rubbish. It is just an excuse, a bad one even, to mask my obsessive behaviour.

This quote from Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ has been in my mind for some time: ‘Hence what was designed in the first instance as a guard or barrier to prevent disruptive impingement on the self, can become the walls of a prison from which the self cannot escape.’

It all seems very apt!