I'm not brave enough to tell her, but if I was, this is what I would say:
Dear N,
This is a bit of an essay that came about as a result of me ruminating after the things we talked about the other day. I hope it serves as an explanation for how I can be sometimes.
You asked me if I feel held back about asking you things. The real answer is, it’s more like I’m holding myself back. The reason is because I’m scared of what will happen if I don’t. One of the quirks of my personality is that I have a very obsessive nature. When I become interested in a subject, it goes the whole way and then some. I can spend weeks, months even, on just one subject, to the point where it interferes with everything else.
For example: The last really huge obsession I had was Wicked. For the few months following the first time I saw it, it was pretty much all I could think about. I suppose it might have been a form of escapism. By focusing on it, I could forget about real life. I engaged with it in every way possible. I listened to the music, read the books and a lot of fanfiction, wrote stories, even read a musical analysis. All my spare time was dedicated to Wicked, at the expense of everything else.
This is a tendency that I have to curb and be strict with myself about, because if I don’t, it has the potential to interfere with my life. Until recently, the only person affected was me. (The only time others got involved was to tell me when they were getting bored of me harping on about the same thing.) But if there is one thing I do *not* want to happen, it’s for that tendency to start having a direct effect on the people around me.
And that’s why I hesitate to ask you about things. Because I’m absolutely terrified, that one day it will be one thing too many. That it will get to the point where it’s too much to handle, or want to bother dealing with. Because there are easier people to be friends with than me. But even more terrifying is the idea that I know I am projecting negativity, and that it has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What if my warped prediction of bad things happening is the thing that makes them happen?
So it’s easier to seek out information alone, in my free time, using indirect means, because it means I can do it privately without people thinking I’m imposing on them. However I do not like to lie or feel like I’m doing anything behind someone’s back. Which puts me in the awkward position of being not quite sure how to deal with it; which consequently results in seemingly strange behaviour on my part as I try to figure out what to do.
I’m sitting here expecting that all of the above sounds overthought and crazy to other people, but these are the sorts of things that go through my head on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is still not the whole story, and there are still things I have yet to tell you that are related to this. But I don’t want to drag this out even longer. So I’ll finish by saying, the more I value something, the more I overthink it - something I need to work on. But if I do or say anything that seems strange, it’s probably just because I’m trying too hard to value it in the correct way.