Overdrive

Mental conversations: I suppose to some extent, everybody has them.

My mental conversations are almost omnipresent.
Sometimes to the point of getting actually too much and setting my mind on overdrive. No, I do not - at least not to my knowledge - suffer from schizophrenia.The conversations still leave me in full consciousness of the fact that they ARE mentally run, and mentally only.

Sometimes I have these conversations with just myself, reminding me of things I should really get done now, or telling me to stop being so daft.
There are other conversations, though, with people I know and speak to in real life.
Their part of the mental conversation is done in their own voice, or, the way I remember their voice (which is not always 100 % accurate - memories hardly ever are, especially not if a long time has passed since I actually spoke to the person in question).

When situations arise in either my life or the life of those dear to me, situations that require special attention, the conversations can become very intense, and the same few sentences may be repeated several times, not to make them more "believable", but because the topic is so relevant to me or them (and thus, to me again) I find it hard to focus on anything minor.

Take this past weekend, for example.
A friend of mine (and, from my point of view, a close friend at that) had reached a point where a decision was required. A decision that would affect not only my friend's way of life but also that of those around. Neither way easy, neither without their own problems.
But - I couldn't help.

Now, I am not afflicted by the infamous Helper Syndrome anymore than by schizophrenia or dandruff, but my friends do matter to me, and if I can, I help them.
Not in this case, though.

In spite of me doing lots of other things during that weekend, my friend was never far from my thoughts. The mental conversations went on almost non-stop, especially at night when there were no distractions.
Overdrive - mixing those conversations with some others that seemed to press in without being called for - made sleep hard to find, a relatively rare occurrence for me.
So far, I have not found a method to stop the conversations.
And I am not sure I actually want to.