[uncensored]: Obsession Circuit

As salaam alaikum,

Sometimes, my brain annoys me. The other day, I was wondering if part of my brain suffered some kind of damage from an unknown insult years ago for which I am currently suffering the sequelae. Either that, or sometime in my childhood for an unknown reason I formed a maladaptive circuit within my basal ganglia which causes me to go into these behaviors and have these thoughts against my will. Maybe that would explain my obsessive nature.

Maybe somewhere in my brain, I have an Obsession Circuit.

I mean, it's good for some things. I became obsessed with Spanish at one point, that helped me learn it. I was obsessed with getting into UCSF for medical school and that helped me get into the medical schools I got into. I certainly still obsessed with Brazilian Portuguese, and that's why I can speak it almost fluently now. So it's not a bad thing, necessarily, just a personality trait that has helped me learn and achieve certain things...

But those obsession are nothing as compared to my man obsession.

My sophomore year of college, I spent every day thinking about this man every few minutes or so. It was totally against my will, totally annoying, especially when, by the end of the year, I discovered that we would not end up together. I very much cooled down after that and recovered, but for some reason, recently, two years after this man got engaged and a couple of months after he's gotten married, he and his wife have been popping up in my dreams.

Last night, it was the fault of this guy. I went to an Erykah Badu concert [which was awesome, by the way...she is not small anymore], and there was this guy sitting two rows in front of me that reminded me of him...tall and awkward, but black, with a mohawk and these crazy glasses on. Because of this guy, I had a dream about the man last night. It's never anything sexual, and it never was...he was on the phone, talking to his wife while stuck at work, reading GQ magazine and discussing something about fashion. This time, he had the mohawk and the crazy glasses.

Later in the night, in a separate dream, his wife was on some fashion television show getting ready to be interviewed. At that point, I woke myself up and I prayed.

I take comfort that I can make du'a whenever I need it, any time or day and night. I prayed to God to abolish this from my mind, whatever this is, this obsession circuit, because this is getting to be ridiculous.

It's not even really an active thing. For years, I haven't sought him (or them) out on facebook. However, since they're both my facebook friends, yes, sometimes they pop up on the newsfeed. Besides the dream I had the day they got married (in which they were advising me about the smart way to lose weight...it's always really random with me), that's how I found out they got married.

With this whole thing, me and this guy's eventual relationship and how it didn't work out, I must say...the internet is a bitch.

So many things wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the internet...like, I wouldn't have found out that his sister told him he should befriend more Pakistani women the day after I went out with him if it weren't for the internet, so I wouldn't have been devastated and I maybe wouldn't have fallen into my obsession circuit with him, actually, which turned into a self-validation "Am I good enough" thing and had little to do with the man himself...

Actually, that's probably the main thing.

I'm tired of dreaming about him and his wife, seriously! And the dreams are always stupid? Seriously, reading GQ? An television interview about fashion?

My problem is, whether I like it or not, he was my prototype, so if I see people who remind me of him when I liked him, this piques my interest. Unfortunately for me, the way my brain works, this means that he and his wife will make cameos in my dreams.

He's never alone. Haha, because in my brain, it's improper of me to dream of a married man unaccompanied by his wife, in halal terms. My thing is, I don't find it halal to be thinking about, dreaming about a married man at all, even if his wife is always right there next to him in my thoughts, in my dreams.

Stupid obsession circuit!

One thing this has all done...it has purified my intentions for the story I'm writing, A Rose Much Desired. This man is the basis of one of the characters in the story, named Mo. When I originally wrote the story in November 2007 [National Novel Writers Month, NaNoWriMo--it was 50,000 words at the time], for Mo, I wrote this character, Maida, who he was unofficially seeing who everyone expected him to propose to. This character was based on, you guessed it, his wife. The crazy hilarious thing was...they weren't engaged yet, and I didn't actually know that they were unofficially together until they got engaged, and I was like, oooh...I'm psychic. They got engaged the next year, and I was like, well crap, if these characters seem too much like them, it would seem kind of inflammatory, like I was trying to actively say something about their relationship, which was never my intention.

So over the years I've more loosely based the characters off of these people with the knowledge that they were actually getting married, and I've altered some dialogue and plot...the main plot remains, though. That's one thing I didn't sacrifice.

So in terms of purifying my intentions...my intention is no longer any sort of bitter remembrance/calling this man out as it kind of was when I started this. My intention is more telling the story of two women, one growing up surrounded my Muslim boys and her becoming intrigued by their contradictions in spite of their religion and their culture who ultimately falls for a Muslim man, the other a Muslimah, cornering herself into isolation as the attempts to become more practicing but finding herself socially at the margins of Islam. Though Mo is the focus of one of the main narrations in the story, and although he's protagonist, his role is more supportive than anything as compared to these women.

I'll talk more about this story later, and post some excerpts once I get further in editing.

But the morning is young. I just had to post [uncensored] for a second about my ridiculous brain. Maybe putting it out there will help me overcome the insanity from within.

Off to the gym. I need to start doing crunches.