You Can't Fight What You Can't See
Many a times you are fighting with demons in your mind that only exists in your mind and nowhere else. You are fighting against the perceived slights, against people who were indifferent to you, who didn’t support you, who belittled you, who underestimated you. Your mind relives all those sessions again and again until you haven’t settled score with every one of those people.
But here’s the problem with this approach. You cannot fight what you cannot see. To wage a war you need two people to agree that there is going to be a war. Right now only you have agreed to the war, the other party is missing. Imagine raising cannons, deploying your troops without the enemy at the gates, how stupid would that feel.
This is what it actually means when you exaggerate your problems to an extent that you fail to see there is no one at the other end. You need to learn to reduce the severity of the problem by reminding yourself that you cannot fight with someone you cannot see. The battle is only inside your head and has no bearing on the reality.
It’s not easy to stop your mind when it’s racing and that is why you have to be clever enough to identify and call out your own absurdities. Analogies like that help in calling out the absurdity. The more you train yourseld to identify the futility, the absurdity, the comical thing about your thought patterns the easier it will become to be free from it.