A glass of water should not require much thought. Mine somehow did. What followed was one of those small, ridiculous chains of thought that starts with something completely ordinary and ends somewhere you didn’t quite expect. It made me wonder how much of what we call self-awareness is actually just another way of overthinking ourselves — and how often the things we would rather not admit are the ones worth noticing.

Yesterday, or perhaps it was the day before yesterday, I left a glass of water somewhere near me and forgot about it. I only noticed it properly today, sitting there exactly where I had left it, which made me realise that I had apparently gone through the previous day without drinking nearly enough water. I had coffee, I had some matcha, I vaguely remember drinking some water when I was in a shop because somebody offered it to me, but that glass had been sitting there, and I had apparently walked past it, looked at it, probably moved it once or twice, and never thought, I am thirsty.

So I started wondering whether I had actually been thirsty and simply hadn’t noticed. Did my body want water and I ignored it? Or did I not feel thirsty at all? Was I distracted? Was I just busy? Was my body quietly doing its job while my mind was occupied with more important matters, such as absolutely nothing that I can now remember? It was a simple thought, really, but I could feel my brain preparing to make a whole production out of it. How much water had I drunk? Does coffee count? Does matcha count? How much water should I drink? Should I start keeping a record? Should I buy one of those enormous bottles with the motivational messages printed down the side, so that at two in the afternoon it can tell me that I am not where I should be in my hydration journey?

And I thought, for God’s sake, it is a glass of water. Drink it.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Somehow the glass made me think about how aware we actually are of ourselves. Not how many things we know about ourselves, or how many labels we can attach to ourselves, or how many childhood patterns we can identify. I mean the ordinary sort of awareness where you simply notice what is happening inside you while it is happening, before you have had time to make it respectable.

And then, because life has a rather good sense of timing, I thought about someone who had ghosted me.

I won’t say who or whether it was a man or a woman because it really does not matter. Someone disappeared from my life after telling me that they were not the sort of person who would do that. I remember that because there is something almost preposterously confident about people explaining to you what they would never do just before doing precisely that. Anyway, they disappeared, there was no explanation, and eventually life moved on. You stop checking. You stop wondering. You stop expecting the message. At some point you genuinely don’t care very much anymore.

Then today I noticed some activity from that person on my account.

And I felt happy.

Not because my account had been visited. It was not exactly a royal appearance. I felt happy because my immediate thought was, oh, so you are thinking about me. So you haven’t forgotten me. Good. I am not quite as easy to forget as you perhaps imagined.

There was nothing particularly noble about it. I liked knowing that the person who had walked away without an explanation had, for whatever reason, looked in my direction again. And then I had another thought: if this person called me, I would deliberately not answer, just so they could experience a little of what I had experienced.

That is the sort of thing we don’t usually admit about ourselves. We prefer the version where we have healed, moved on, found peace and learned the lesson. The less attractive version is that there was a tiny part of me thinking, actually, I would quite like you to feel bad for a minute too.

I could have dressed the thought up, of course. I could have called it self-respect. I could have called it emotional protection. I could have gone looking for some highly sophisticated explanation for why my nervous system had produced this response, because apparently saying, “I was annoyed and wanted the other person to know how it felt” is far too ordinary when we can instead choose a word like perspicacious and pretend we are conducting an international inquiry into our own emotional affairs.

I could simply have said I was being a bit petty.

But where is the sophistication in that?

Why use a perfectly good word that everybody understands when you can choose something nobody asked for and sound considerably more intelligent?

The funny part was that after the feeling settled, I realised that if the person actually did call, I probably would answer. I would not trust the person again in the same way. That is a different matter. Something had happened. But I would probably pick up, and I would probably be happy to hear from them too, which made my earlier revenge fantasy look rather less impressive.

I was angry, but not exactly. I was over it, but clearly not so completely that the person’s attention meant nothing to me. I wanted a little revenge, but I also knew I probably would not take it.

Fine. That was the truth.

I liked being noticed. I wanted someone who hurt me to feel a little of what I had felt. I would probably still answer their call. There was no need to turn it into anything grander than that.

We have become very good at turning perfectly ordinary feelings into investigations. A little jealousy needs an explanation. Anger needs a backstory. Hurt needs a pattern. Apparently nothing can simply happen inside us anymore without somebody, usually ourselves, arriving with a clipboard.

Sometimes you’re just annoyed. Sometimes you want somebody to regret what they did. Sometimes you know perfectly well that you would still answer the phone.

I didn’t need to decide which version was the real me. They all were.

So I let the feeling sit there. It passed. I would not trust that person again in the same way, but I was not angry anymore.

That was enough. No personal-growth announcement. No forgiveness ceremony before lunch. No declaration that I had chosen peace. Certainly no report.

Which brought me back to the glass.

I did not know I was thirsty, or perhaps I did and ignored it. I still don’t know. I could spend half an hour trying to work out which one is true, and there are probably people somewhere who would happily help me investigate it for a reasonable fee.

But I noticed the glass.

And I drank the water.

It was almost embarrassingly simple. I had spent all that time wondering whether I was aware of my own thirst when the answer, rather unhelpfully, was sitting in front of me.

Perhaps that is all self-awareness occasionally amounts to: noticing something before you turn it into a theory.

I was happy that someone who had ghosted me had looked at my account. I had a stupid little revenge thought. I knew I would probably answer the phone anyway.

Then the person in question appeared on my account again.

Seriously?

Again?

Apparently.

And naturally, I looked.

Then I looked again.

Then once more.

So there I was, having just spent an entire evening thinking about how easily we turn every little feeling into an investigation, while checking the account of someone I had supposedly stopped caring about.

The glass beside me was empty.

My body had been asking for water since yesterday.

And then I checked the account again.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

I literally did it again.

What the fuck was that?