Obsessions

There comes a time or multiple times in your life when you get obsessed with something or someone. Then it becomes the first thing you think about when you wake up, the last when you go to sleep. If it’s a thing you want to possess it, if it’s a person you want to be with it. It consumes you whole, occupying your every thought, guiding your every move, making you blind to everyone and everything around you. It becomes what Paulo Coelho calls the Zahir but we usually call it love. It’s not love, its obsession. Love doesn’t hurt, obsession does. ‘The Zahir’ has been a pretty awesome read especially being a big help in differentiating between all the personal loves and obsessions I’ve had. I thought nothing described the transformation of love into obsession better than this did:

‘Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.
This force is on earth to make us happy, to bring us closer to God and to our neighbour, and yet given the way we love now, we enjoy one hour of anxiety for every minute of peace.’

Obsessions don’t last forever; that fortunately is the good thing about them. Even though it feels like it’ll never end and life would always be this tormenting prison of misery, it ends sometime sooner or later. There comes a time when you can’t care anymore, even if you want to. You want to think about that person/thing but your brain refuses to respond because it’s done with its quota of thinking about the same thing over and over again. You want to muster feelings for it but every feeling seems like you’ve felt it before. Memories start to feel like dreams, things that only happened in your imagination. Solid evidence of the bond that once existed seems to be false testimony or maybe a proof of someone else’s story. There comes a time when you’re so sick of being torn between avenging or forgiving that you leave it upto Allah to decide on the Day of Judgment because you can come up with too many arguments for both sides. You can be one person fighting for both the opponents.

Obsessions are always with things you don’t have, or those you haven’t lost on your own but have been taken away from you. I don’t think obsessions are ever healthy or give you back anything positive; they just always take a very big part of your time, energy, thought, emotions and happiness away from you.