I don’t know when this stopped being curiosity.
It started as something small, almost irrelevant: an impulse to look, to read, to understand what was behind certain words, certain images, certain ideas. I told myself it was just information. Just exploration. Just noise.
But the problem was never what I was seeing.
It was what happened after.
That strange second when I close the content… but it doesn’t close inside me.
As if something stayed open.
As if the body took longer than the mind to realize I had already stopped.
And that’s where the contradiction appears.
Because I should stop.
But I don’t.
I open it again.
Not exactly to find something new, but to return to that strange point where attention shifts shape, where interest stops being clean and becomes insistent, almost physical.
And the worst part is that it starts to take up space.
It’s not just thought.
It’s presence.
Today I went back to reading things I “shouldn’t” have gone back to. And while doing it, I noticed my body becoming more aware of itself than usual. My neck, my breathing, the way I freeze without realizing it.
As if attention wasn’t only on the screen anymore, but also on how I react to myself while looking.
And that’s what destabilizes me.
Because the excitement doesn’t appear as something clear.
It appears mixed with discomfort.
With a soft kind of embarrassment that’s hard to name.
And still, it keeps growing.
Sometimes I feel the hand on the neck in the images or descriptions, and it’s not really the idea itself, but what it leaves behind: that moment where I become aware of my own breathing as if I were observing it from the outside.
It’s not fear.
Not exactly.
It’s attention that becomes too intense to stay neutral.
And the more I try to understand it, the more I look for it.
As if curiosity is being pushed by the same tension that should have stopped it.
As if every “I shouldn’t be interested in this” makes it harder to let go.
Now I realize the problem isn’t what I’m looking at.
It’s that I no longer know when I started watching myself while doing it.
And on that second level, something changes.
Because the body reacts before the idea.
And the idea arrives late, trying to explain something that has already happened.
I feel it again, that internal repetition:
I shouldn’t be here
but I am
just one more moment
just to check
and that “checking” is always the trap.
Because it doesn’t clarify anything.
It just opens the loop again.
And while I write this, I notice something worse:
curiosity is no longer coming before excitement.
Excitement is pushing it.
And curiosity is only trying to follow it, as if it no longer has its own direction.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it I should…
