Mindfreaked!

Here is Shubham Gangopadhyay with another of his unique contributions. This time, it's about the thoughts that "happen" to the brain and how to deal with them. Another interesting read, this one. 

All human beings with the cognitive abilities of their brain have ‘thoughts’ which direct their life at a macro and micro time frame. Some thoughts, in their nature, are meant to be shared - like Tony Stark’s idea of an arc reactor which would have done the world good ( he never shared it ); Your idea about scrapping the semester exams to decrease the burden on students ( absurd, but an idea none the less ); My idea of proposing to this girl I like from my tuition ( it never passed beyond the synapses of my brain ). But other ideas are meant to be locked up in our head, intimate ideas that would drastically change your life for the better or worse if they were revealed - I rather not elaborate on the details of such ideas, they range from the bizarre to the disgusting!

These ineffable thoughts bounce around our head and push us to the edge of our nerves; they force us to reveal them to the world, which is exactly what we don't want to do. Giving any sort of tangible manifestation to these ineffable thoughts outside our brains has catastrophic consequences - just ask twelve year old Sayoni Chatterjee, who embodied her profound thoughts in her diary, and the consequence - her mother found it, read it and learned about the feelings she had for some guy in her class. Outraged, the mother stormed into Sayoni’s school and spoke to the principal. Any of you still in school or college would admit - that is embarrassing! Yet, what this little girl did was worse, she went home and hanged herself, the poor child was a victim of love and mortification.

Coming back to my point, Sayoni died because of one vital component of the equation - her diary. Something as palpable with such intimate secrets deserves to be closely guarded. That’s the mistake Sayoni made; she left her diary in a bookshelf, where her mother stumbled upon it. If Sayoni did want to vent her feelings in a book she should have hidden it in a better location. But honestly there is no better location; “concerned” parents and nosy friends will always uncover the location. So this is my idea to guard your thoughts:

1. Never, ever, under any circumstances reveal the existence of your diary. “Look people, here is my diary! But don’t read it, it’s personal.” You have to be extremely naive to think people won’t read it, even if your friends are loyal and respect your privacy, their curiosity will tip their respect and before you know it - your secret is a text message, zipping around the network lines. If you do happen to have a diary and have revealed its existence to people, fake its destruction while retaining your original diary. If you have a digital diary, all word documents have an encryption feature, use it. 

2. Just keep it in your head - a hard and harrowing ordeal which can only be followed by the strong willed. As I am a practitioner of it myself, I can say that it is not a 100% effective. Some thoughts have to be bubbled out to maintain your sanity but how few those ideas that bubble out, marks your effectiveness at the skill. 

3. Evaluate your thoughts on the basis of their importance. You have demeaning thoughts - thoughts about you and what you think of other people ( I mean whether you hate them, love them or have a special feeling for them ); you have embarrassing thoughts - thoughts about what you did in your past that could tarnish your reputation. They need not be of the same magnitude, like “I had sex with my neighbour’s daughter!” should not be equated to “I wet my bed last night!”. Lastly, you have the normal thoughts - about general ideas of life, who did what, why did you do something. Arranging such thoughts in their order of importance is a good start - deciding what thought should be expressed and what should be kept in. 

Our minds are like a safe with a complex combination - your conscious. That’s the best place that our thoughts can be in, not in the pages of a book, the binary codes of our hard disks or another person’s mind. I intend to keep my intimate thoughts there, in a place no “concerned” parent can linger or pesky friend can invade. The fact that I am sharing this with you is in violation to my rules of ‘thought sharing’ but I fell it is necessary. So that other people don’t follow Sayoni Chatterjee and wreck their lives because they couldn’t safe guard their thoughts.