Obsession is nothing but an idea towards which we unconsciously get drawn to. You think about something or someone over and over in your head and in no time end up creating a whole reality out of the thought. I feel it like an addiction; it starts with the anticipation of adventure and feeds on the hope of realizing this adventure someday!
I obsess over things a lot, sometimes to the point that it starts consuming me. A seed gets planted inside and starts growing all over me, gorging on my energy, only to leave me drained. Despite knowing the draining effect it has had, I love it. I love every bit of it. Somehow, it gives me a feeling of liberation. When I am obsessed with something or someone; there is nothing that can stop me. I know the danger but I love the adventure. The adventure of exploring the territories that I refrain myself from when in control of my super-ego. Obsessed days are the days of my ‘Id’.
Obsession could be for anything. It could be for the job you want, the guy/girl you have a crush on, the race you want to win, or the collectibles you want to own.
When I was in college, I once got obsessed with red lipsticks. My elder sister introduced me to it, and suddenly I wanted to own all shades of red…scarlet red…wine red…mahogany red, all of it. My sister and mother made fun of me and tried to make me realize that once applied, most of the shades look similar and the differences are not evident. But for me – scarlet red was sexy, wine red was sophisticated, and mahogany red was powerful…and I was on the spree of owning them all.
Your obsession makes you feel very powerful at the moment. You feel like you are making a liberated choice once in your life. Maybe this liberated feeling gives us the perception of some meaning in our obsessions and we cling on to it. But obsessions are not bad. I wouldn’t have dared trying many good things in life if it was not for obsession. It becomes toxic only when we linger on to it to the point of irrationality. The problem starts when we want to perpetuate the fanciful world we create around our obsessions. We take it for real, which is highly unlikely. It is like consciously losing yourself to your imaginary world. A world where my teenage self, thought that I could assume any personality just by changing the shade of my lipstick….a sexy scarlet….a sophisticated wine……or a powerful mahogany.
The consequential thing is, with time we all grow out of our obsessions and find our kind of red which just perfectly goes with our personality. It happened to me when I stopped desiring exotic red shades. I unraveled ‘my shade’ – keeping blush, candy, and berry red in my closet only to experiment once in a while.