A thought on thoughts

“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.” - I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid. 

Not a great book, not necessarily a bad one either, but I found passages that stood out to me that stayed with me for days after.

The above quote is one such passage that gave me pause and is something I found myself mulling over. It brought me to my own moments, of social situations; birthdays, weddings, coffee dates or kids parties, where you find yourself just not wanting to be there. You feel uncomfortable or even miserable. Perhaps there was an argument beforehand with your partner or maybe you just had a bad night's sleep. Your mind is on repeat the whole drive there, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go,” a drumming rhythm that gets louder and louder in your mind the closer you get. You arrive, wrestling with your thoughts and wearing that carefully constructed smile that your face learnt to do on impulse that never quite reaches the eyes. You learn to recognise that same smile at times in others. A lie, to protect those around you from… what? The appearance of normality? The societal norms that have been instilled in us since birth? Or to protect yourself maybe? From having to give voice to your own thoughts because once you do, those thoughts, they become real.

Real.

What a terrifying thought.

My own true thoughts come out at night. Midnight has always been my hour. The long and weary day of having to do all the things expected of me are over, everyone’s asleep. And what’s left at that hour is just… me. The smile slips, like smeared lipstick smudging away the day's perfection, and the thoughts that have been held back all day come out in relief. How often do we do this? Go to places we don’t want to go, speak with people we have nothing in common with because we have to, make that awful small talk with people you’ve known for years who have never quite known or understood you. Fuck. I don’t even know if they understand themselves. We go to work, to family functions, important events that feel like pulling out teeth at times and paste on this version of ourselves that we don’t really like. Not so much because of the company, but because of the restrictive mask we place on ourselves, a muzzle that’s been there so long that we hardly notice it anymore.

My own thoughts come out in a rush of words, kind of like these, written because I’ve always been better at writing than speaking. You'd think a writer would be good at speaking too. You'd be wrong. I need time to collect my thoughts and writing is the only way I can truly be honest in away I never could by merely talking.
Sometimes, I’d dare voice my thoughts to others. Sometimes they’re welcome and I feel a rare moment of being understood by someone. A smile, so real it almost comes as a surprise takes over but those can be so rare that I can't help but wonder at it. Mostly, though, they float away into nothing, and I crawl into myself, feeling emptier inside than before.
So I just write it out. Because without words, without giving voice to our thoughts, surely that way lies madness? Or is it just me? Maybe I wasn’t built right. The pretence exhausts me, words build up inside me, spilling over while I try to hold them down. It’s a form of torture on the mind.

We all have thoughts we’d never voice aloud. Deep, inner thoughts that, frankly, are better left in the dark where they belong. What an awful world it would be if everyone spoke their thoughts aloud. But what a sad world it is that we cannot ever feel that we can voice some of those thoughts that make us us. Some thoughts are fleeting, born from an emotion that we feel so intensely and once it has run its course, those thoughts are diminished, only a hint of it remaining, laying low somewhere in the shadows of our minds. Somewhere along the way though, we’ve learnt to bury more and more of ourselves and who we are with them. We’ve become so good at it that we wouldn’t even notice it anymore if it weren’t for the exhaustion that inevitably takes hold. That fixed smile, the one we wear for appearances, becomes so heavy.

Where does our reality really exist? What is truth? The part we choose to show the world? Or the part we keep carefully hidden away in our minds?