Reframing

I am so cranky. And so f*ing sensitive sometimes. I just let little things have so much bearing on my feelings, my entire day.

Last night I had intentions of exercising, then making a new recipe. I did a pathetic 15 minutes on the bike, then bought pizza on the way home. Which is really not a failure. Seriously. As I was driving to the pizza place I felt so tired; I have no problem taking days off from exercise, and I don't feel the need to behave like Martha Stewart in the kitchen every night.

But then I went to bed super late, hanging out with the Internet beforehand. Good thing Dibby joined me on the love seat, as I set aside the computer to make room for him and thus stopped short the web time.

I don't know why I make so many things into failures, why I inflate things to a point of (almost) no return.

I'm constantly on community watch, eyeing people and surroundings for potential suspicious activity. Who knows exactly why I do this; because my anxiously extended brain feels as if it needs something to do, I guess. I'm the self-appointed honorary police officer, which is ridiculous, because I would never sign up for that profession in real life. Which is to say that my freakish worrying is something that exists in its own plane, one that doesn't jive with, well, not worrying and instead moving forward to do real things in real life.

But the thing is that anxiety feels so real. It is real, and what fuels it is real--although it is often unclear what motivates it, beyond stress, pent-up anger, sadness. But its ability to feed through our systems to a point that we can't see past some stupid small thing that we've inflated to a huge cloud which in reality we may not have any basis for accepting as truth--that should be recognized as a hindrance trying to get in the way of what's real.

My school sends job and internship alerts out all the time. I often skip right over them. I open them to get rid of the bold highlighting that shows them as unread, which would leave it as a clanging alarm, but I rarely look over the details of the positions being offered. I assume myself inadequate. I assume everyone else in this program ten times more adequate, and if not so then at least savvy enough to convince an interviewer they are. Because they'll get an interview, while I probably won't even get a courtesy email.

I'm getting better at not doing this, with coaching. Never underestimate the power of a coach(es), dear friends. If I've learned anything in my growing pains it is that going it alone will land you in the fetal position, often phoning a friend anyway.*

Telling myself what is real, what is true, is one step I am taking, over and over again. As many times as it takes to make it a habit, then second nature. I try to tell myself that in order to begin the "not worthy" thoughts, I need to at least apply to something. Or at the very least look at the job description and discover that, indeed, I do not have elephant whisperer skills (and, too, to tell myself in some situations as these that maybe I do have hidden talents and think about the possibility of telling employers that I am teachable, and a quick learner, because that, in fact, is true. I can't learn everything, for example I imagine I wouldn't pick up stock trading easily, or ever, but I can certainly learn a lot.)

And while I don't have to apply to 30 internships per month, I need to go beyond the quarter-assed method of sending along a tired resume to a job I'm only sort-of qualified for, and not a good fit, via email, once every three months.

Briefly: I need to try.

I have creative, bright, talented friends and family. They tell me I am these things too. But when they tell me I usually walk away feeling effervescent and then turn on "Kim and Kourtney Take New York."

To be fair, a lot of these motivating conversations happen over beers on happy Friday nights, so when one arrives home from such it's not exactly prime time to write cover letters. Though maybe it is. With a good edit over a Saturday French press, probably, with a kitty nearby mewing for food and the first of his weekend attentions from his human.

Some other things I blow out of proportion: suddenly thinking someone doesn't appreciate me, or is annoyed with me, or thinks me to be less of a colleague, peer, mentor, than all the others out there. This can come from a short email reply which is really not meant to hurt anyone's feelings or mean anything specially negative, or being asked to do something differently than I normally would, or from nothing at all.

In these situations I am trying, again, to ask myself whether or not any of these conflated thoughts I have are true. Do I have any evidence that I am liked less than my other classmates? Was I perhaps not invited to that party because I'm not on Facebook, and the invites were mostly casual? Do I even care that I wasn't invited? Maybe a teeny tiny bit, but the reality is that I usually get an invite to a smaller get-together each weekend, and that's more my scene anyway.

I'm trying to focus on the real. And on finding solutions rather than shoving away my feelings, only to have them grow inside that drawer where I attempted to hide them.

I just slipped a piece of gum in my mouth because I had a weird taste going on. Problem. Solved. When the chomping starts to distract me from my reading later, I'll spit it out. I know this isn't rocket science, but get inside my brain for five minutes and you might understand that, to me, it can feel as such.

Next up: There is a bunch of strewn paperwork in my office. I'm going to sort it, toss it, file it. Then my surroundings will be more loving to me. You know, to the extent that inanimate objects can be compassionate.

All of this might make me sound like a paranoid child to you. And to the former and the latter in that description, I'd probably agree with you to a mild to moderate degree (I do hope and pray I don't reach a level of paranoid psychosis; but do I worry too much? Yes. Do I feel like a child sometimes? Yes). But I also feel like an adult who's shedding some gross skin which is no longer serving me well. After all, fashions change, and I don't want to be caught in last season's moodiness and muddy stuckness.

*In December I was visiting Nick and making a list of daily activities to combat depression/anxiety, and I wrote "phone a friend," to which Nick added "ask the audience." Our friend Sammy came over for dinner and, eyeing the list, asked, "Ask the audience?" Nick laughed at his clever ways. I translated.