The Secret Basement

A long time ago I began to be an overthinker. There are a multitude of reasons for this but recently I’ve begun to address the issues behind it all.

My overthinking can take monumentally damaging turns. I will believe people hate me due to one interaction with one person. I will avoid people for years because I THINK I’ve upset them, without knowing one way or the other. A friend once pointed out that I am like Schroedinger except that I always assume the cat has died without looking to check.

Meditation has helped me tons in this endeavour to dig into the foundations of a life of bitten fingernails, and recently I had a dream that could best be described as analogous.

I was looking at a basement door, the kind that opens upwards like you get in scary American horror movies. As I was looking at it I realised that the door wasn’t real, it was just a façade and that the real door lay underneath. I grabbed the fake door handle and pulled and it concertinaed back to reveal another, slightly different and older door beneath. Opening that, I saw a dark and scary looking basement, with grey stone stairs and the shadows of the objects and possessions kept in there.

I felt the fear rising in my throat and the butterflies in my stomach. The basement, I knew, contained the things that I have let bring me anxiety and stress over my life. The basement looked forbidding and a place where monsters may lurk. It wasn’t welcoming in the slightest and I didn’t want to go down there.

Then, I shone my torch into the basement and the fear started to melt away.

There were cobwebs on the sides of the old, uneven stone steps and I could see a huge statue, also cobwebbed and with moss on it. It was, I knew, something that had scared me many times as a child and later in life as an adult but now it was just a statue, a thing, not scary in the slightest. I began to walk down the steps and I saw boxes and boxes of things. The stairs went on for quite a way, after all the statue was tall and as I ventured down the steps became wooden and I saw boxes and boxes of junk, meaningless and non threatening junk that I was completely indifferent to. These things couldn’t hurt me or even fire my overthinking imagination any more. They were just objects. I had no emotions towards them beyond a slight bemusement that they had ever bothered me so badly in the past.

When I finally got to the bottom I realised that, despite there being cobwebs everywhere, there were no spiders or creatures of any kind in this once scary basement. I shone my torch at the walls and expected to see nasty shapes theatrically scurrying into the shadows but there were none.

I looked around and saw boxes and boxes of old stuff that had zero emotional significance for me. Like finding the attic of an old relative’s house. Interesting but the memories are not yours and you have no connection to what’s in there.

I went back up the stairs, still wondering if my dream state would throw a curve ball at me, such as making the stairs disappear or having something lunge from the shadows at me…but there was nothing.

I came out back into the light of the main room that the basement door was in and shut it behind me but leaving the fake door open.

The secret basement was never scary when seen for what it was. It was only the things it contained that frightened me, when seen out of context.