This just occurred to me... (my apologies to everyone who really understands computers...I'm sure I will really mess up on this analogy)

I was watching a TV show with my son and then having this intellectual/political conversation with him... and I realized how I stopped being involved in real life (outside of what absolutely needed to be done for my job or my family) and stopped thinking about things that really interested me in the last 10 years or so...

And its like I realized all of my life I've had these "programs running in the background" and then suddenly I had a glitch and these programs started using up all of my RAM and they took over more and more of my mind and energy and they stopped being "run in the background" and they became more of all that is running...

Recently I've had these advertising programs take over my browser... i can't go onto a retail site without all of these competing ads coming up. So i finally click on these ads and it actually told me the name of the program and what to do if you want to delete it. So I go to my uninstall programs and look in the list and the advertising program isn't listed there....yet it is still in my browser.... So I start looking at all the other programs that look like advertising ones or ones that installed recently and start uninstalling them to see if any of them will get rid of these ad pop ups and they don't seem to work... Or I find a program I want to uninstall and I highlight the program name and click on uninstall and nothing happens...

Its like the "programs running in background" are my past.... and its no longer in the background and its taking up more and more of my time and energy to keep it in the background... and therapy is like trying to unistall these programs... I think "this" is the problem so I work on that in therapy... its helpful but those damn thoughts (ads) keeping popping up and so then I start to work on "this other" issue and it seems like it just goes on and on...

I wish my brain was like a computer where I could just get it re-imaged all at once....

Not sure what I want to get out of this thread....maybe just not to feel alone in these thoughts...Anyone else feel like this? or maybe you have a different analogy you use for your journey you'd like to share?