Clearly, there were things I needed to get off my chest.

I could feel the knocking of thoughts in my skull, though it was not quite a pounding. Not yet.

Knock knock.

Yes? My mind called.

Write me. Open the box.

Soon! Soon, I promise! I replied.

No. Now, it retorted. You always say that. That's why you get so overwhelmed. You avoid us. You can't keep avoiding your thoughts, that's how you melt down and develop mental health issues.

I paused. Maybe that one was right.

You know I'm right it insisted. Just like when you feel those weird rushes of emotions and you just shrug them aside. You strain away from them because they're uncomfortable and you think they're going to bring you pain. But they're like a splinter- if you keep tiptoeing around them trying to ignore them they'll work their way deeper, and you'll keep getting hurt by them when you're unprepared. Focus on them as they come up, dig them out, and you won't have this problem of accumulating more and more of them. And put on some shoes.

I wasn't sure how the shoes part of it fit in.

Perhaps my mind had gone too far with the metaphors, as it often did.

Er... I wasn't sure what to say, or rather to think back at myself.

Protect yourself, it said patiently. What do you do when you discover the ground you’re walking over is littered with thorns? Put on shoes.

Doesn't that mean… not feel?

The splinters aren't the problem. Walking barefoot is.

Confusion wrinkled my brow. One more time?

It sighed, if thoughts could sigh. Well, I imagined it did.

Yo, it said … thought. You gotta think about prevention. When a splinter attaches to you you gotta get it out. When a painful thought appears you gotta inspect it and figure out where it goes. Get under it and what's holding it in place. The longer you ignore it and let it bury itself, potentially the worse it could become. Or you could heal around it, which may work with splinters but with thoughts you always feel it in the end, just you don't always remember why - that's trauma - so you gotta dig again. Safely. Which is why it’s best to learn how to deal with it and not ignore it when you feel it. That's so you can get healing.

This was profound. It was amazing what I could learn from myself, I thought, arrogantly. Or perhaps ironically.

Thinking with oneself was hard. It was two conversations, but from one mind, and you weren’t sure when you were supposed to be in contradiction with yourself, what was the protocol of politeness. What was humility, and what was the expected social convention. How did one act around oneself? How much deference and reserving of opinions did one give, rather than cause offence? How much vulnerability and self-self-disclosure?

I was so wrapped up in processing this - and I suppose processing was the point - that I wasn't sure now whether to ask what I’d meant to about the shoes metaphor, the actual question I'd been meaning.

The shoes aren't to protect against your thoughts, the thought said, reading my mind. You gotta feel them. I just mean when you realise something you're doing - like walking in a field, or ignoring your thoughts to carry on working - is hurting you, you gotta stop and think. Re-evaluate. Try a different strategy, one that doesn't hurt quite so much. One that doesn’t accumulate so many splinters in the first place. You gotta protect yourself. You can't just “power through” when something's hurting. It'll end up accumulating into multiple unhealed and festering hurts, which will end up hurting a lot more things, hurting your whole life, and it probably won't take long.

I've been hurting for years, I argued, defensively. Why was I arguing? Why did I want to feel like I could just keep enduring pain? It was contradictory... because I also didn’t want to.

But were you aware of it like you are now?

Well… no. Not like this.

Then why not fix it?

I gritted my teeth.

I push back because I want to know that you care I thought at my thought.

I do. It replied. You do. It's hurting you. And those others who love you care about you too.

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