I'm scared of myself

(CW: mention of a suicide attempt, abuse)

I'm scared of myself.

It's something to do with feeling like my thoughts somehow influence reality, and my thoughts are scary. Sometimes they are about real possibilities, other times about grandiose fantasies. Sometimes it is things that I want, and sometimes it is exactly the opposite. Always, though, they are vivid, present, and nearly there.

One can indeed argue that thoughts do influence reality: your decision-making, goals, and plans all come from your mind. But what really concerns me is this almost unavoidable human tendency for magical thinking, for "manifesting", for "praying".

It is easy enough to categorize away certain thoughts as simply impossible by physical laws, but what happens on the border between practicality, desire, and hubris? What if I want something that someone else who I care for doesn't want? And worse, what if I think I know how to get there? I can see a version of me, that if unshackled from other desires and wants, could attempt to do something horrible, maybe even if the only thing holding it back was knowledge that something is wrong.

There are times in my life that I have done bad things. I sincerely doubt that if you are both human and reading this, that this does not apply to you in at least some small way. Some of these bad acts are the fault of simple ignorance, while others have more complex motivations, sometimes the rationale of which is simply lost to memory. I hope I have not inflicted severe trauma on anybody, and I have reasons to believe that I indeed have not done that, but there are edge cases where I think I might have been a minor part of something societally bad (usually stuff about gender and privileged classes).

This isn't a mea culpa, though. I don't think the specifics get to the point of what I am trying to communicate. My mind feels dangerous. And thus my desires, my hopes, perhaps even just my instincts feel also dangerous.

There's precedent for this in the things I have observed. "This is clearly a mark of being abused," one might say, and while, sure, that is most likely a large contributor to my intrusive thoughts, another part of it is that I have been correct about bad things happening to society. I want to say that there is a feedback loop here, or confirmation bias, but today when I write this is the 1st of February, 2026 CE, and you may note in the future that these times were, indeed, horrible.

It is your mind's job to make plans by anticipating the future, and I did on the 13th of August, 2013, when I wrote down the final words I'd thought I'd ever write, guilt-ridden over a questionably-real series of events that I'd rather not further emphasize, predicting a dire future for humanity if things did not heal and recover, and did not hold people accountable. That vision was real.

But I'm still here, obviously, and intend to be for the indefinite future. Why?

Because I can't influence reality further otherwise.

I want things to happen. I want things to be better. I want my loved ones not to suffer.

Wanting things is fatiguing, both in the generic human way of spending mental effort and capacity, but also for me, considering the possibilities that wanting something seems to demand. If I want something, how do I achieve it? And what happens when I have competing wants? There's more decision making to be done, always.

There's a lot to unpack here with my identity, and perhaps a short piece like this is insufficient to express that, but I think I am biased towards an expectation that I am scaring people due to my size and gender assigned at birth (I'm like 193 or 4 centimeters / 6'4"). I'm White, so obviously, I am privileged in that regard.

I feel like there's supposed to be an insight here, that I am supposed to close this out with some sort of hopeful message. I don't think I can do that yet, not because there isn't some way to make my mind better, but because I have really only just coherently expressed this to myself.

I want to think that I can be safer and more comfortable; either there is a way and I find it, or there isn't, and it is irrelevant what I do. Just thinking nihilistically doesn't yield utility regardless of the actual state of the world.

So I'll search for something.