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Moving and anxiety: they go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The movers arrive between 8 and 9 AM on September 7, so I have about eight days. Happily the next four of them are a four-day weekend which I will be wanting to spend barricaded inside my home anyway. (Happy 110th Anniversary, Harley Davidson! Happy Festival of Constant Rumbling and Oh God the Traffic, everyone else!)
Tonight I did 2 episodes of WTNV ("Valentine" and "The Traveler") worth of getting rid of stuff (it's like a 20/10 but Cecil talks to me the whole time and then I go play Candy Crush for a while), plus packing the one box I had available to pack. I wound up with a bit more than two trash bags full of stuff I feel varying levels of guilt about throwing away (I'm at the point in moving where I just give myself permission to throw stuff out rather than find some more mindful way to dispose of it), plus a disassembled IKEA bookcase and a VCR I bought with my very own paper route money in 1996 for the purpose of taping episodes of The X-Files. It's been a great 17 years, VCR, but I'm not moving you to yet another domicile where you'll sit on a closet shelf until it's time to move again.
Saying farewell also to a couple of pairs of shoes that appeared to have grown mold, and the bags the shoes were stored in. Farewell, Skechers platform Mary Janes I wore to college graduation in 2003. You will be missed, in sort of a philosophical sense, but you literally stayed in the bottom of the closet long enough to grow mold.
In related news, I feel vaguely itchy everywhere and I should probably just take some Claritin on general principle.
Anxiety level is now at the (yes, quite possibly deluded), "Huh, I think I've got a handle on this," stage.
Except actually there's a bunch of other stuff I want to say about my anxiety level.
So I had gone through most of my life thinking of myself as a cheerful laid-back slacker, easily distractible and constantly daydreaming. I kind of recognized that my patterns of thought and behavior were really consistently escapist, but, huh! I thought. Weird! Because I didn't really have anything to be escaping from!
I had noticed, of course, that my main way of dealing with feeling sad or upset or anxious was to Think About Something Else, although that was really barely distinguishable from my mindset all the time; I'm constantly slipping off into stories, whether stories I'm reading/watching or stories I'm making up. That's where my writing comes from, and I've been making up stories and wanting to be a writer literally since before I knew how to write.
So a few months ago I was feeling really anxious and for once I wasn't able to distract myself with fic. It just wasn't working, and fairly shortly I wound up sobbing at my kitchen table because what was wrong with me? I wasn't an anxious or sad person! I was a person who liked stories and could always be happy reading stories! And suddenly I was neither of those things, and it occurred to me, what if I'm really an anxious person with coping mechanisms that don't always work.
That felt like kind of a shattering realization at the time, which probably had something to do with, you know, already being in hysterical tears. It's not a good time for thinking calmly about personal revelations. But a bit later, when I was breathing normally and had had a sleep and so on, I realized that, well, yeah, that was sort of obvious actually. I'm an anxious person, and I hit upon stories as a means of self-regulating when I was somewhat less than six years old, so now I'm a writer. And still anxious, underneath that.
All of which is to say that, having figured this out, I can actually gauge my own moods better now, and it's kind of fascinating in a way that is probably super elementary to people who are more self-aware than I have been up til now. I can figure out when I have to disengage from stuff that's worrying me! I can sit on the bus and concentrate on working out the Fibonacci Sequence or silently reciting times tables instead of continuing to poke at my moving-week feeling of formless dread! I can watch Shelter when I'm having a bad day and then feel calm enough to confront a little bit of reality before giving that a rest and watching Legally Blonde!
Self care, it is amazing. I had no idea. Because I thought I didn't need any. Hooray learning!
Tonight I did 2 episodes of WTNV ("Valentine" and "The Traveler") worth of getting rid of stuff (it's like a 20/10 but Cecil talks to me the whole time and then I go play Candy Crush for a while), plus packing the one box I had available to pack. I wound up with a bit more than two trash bags full of stuff I feel varying levels of guilt about throwing away (I'm at the point in moving where I just give myself permission to throw stuff out rather than find some more mindful way to dispose of it), plus a disassembled IKEA bookcase and a VCR I bought with my very own paper route money in 1996 for the purpose of taping episodes of The X-Files. It's been a great 17 years, VCR, but I'm not moving you to yet another domicile where you'll sit on a closet shelf until it's time to move again.
Saying farewell also to a couple of pairs of shoes that appeared to have grown mold, and the bags the shoes were stored in. Farewell, Skechers platform Mary Janes I wore to college graduation in 2003. You will be missed, in sort of a philosophical sense, but you literally stayed in the bottom of the closet long enough to grow mold.
In related news, I feel vaguely itchy everywhere and I should probably just take some Claritin on general principle.
Anxiety level is now at the (yes, quite possibly deluded), "Huh, I think I've got a handle on this," stage.
Except actually there's a bunch of other stuff I want to say about my anxiety level.
So I had gone through most of my life thinking of myself as a cheerful laid-back slacker, easily distractible and constantly daydreaming. I kind of recognized that my patterns of thought and behavior were really consistently escapist, but, huh! I thought. Weird! Because I didn't really have anything to be escaping from!
I had noticed, of course, that my main way of dealing with feeling sad or upset or anxious was to Think About Something Else, although that was really barely distinguishable from my mindset all the time; I'm constantly slipping off into stories, whether stories I'm reading/watching or stories I'm making up. That's where my writing comes from, and I've been making up stories and wanting to be a writer literally since before I knew how to write.
So a few months ago I was feeling really anxious and for once I wasn't able to distract myself with fic. It just wasn't working, and fairly shortly I wound up sobbing at my kitchen table because what was wrong with me? I wasn't an anxious or sad person! I was a person who liked stories and could always be happy reading stories! And suddenly I was neither of those things, and it occurred to me, what if I'm really an anxious person with coping mechanisms that don't always work.
That felt like kind of a shattering realization at the time, which probably had something to do with, you know, already being in hysterical tears. It's not a good time for thinking calmly about personal revelations. But a bit later, when I was breathing normally and had had a sleep and so on, I realized that, well, yeah, that was sort of obvious actually. I'm an anxious person, and I hit upon stories as a means of self-regulating when I was somewhat less than six years old, so now I'm a writer. And still anxious, underneath that.
All of which is to say that, having figured this out, I can actually gauge my own moods better now, and it's kind of fascinating in a way that is probably super elementary to people who are more self-aware than I have been up til now. I can figure out when I have to disengage from stuff that's worrying me! I can sit on the bus and concentrate on working out the Fibonacci Sequence or silently reciting times tables instead of continuing to poke at my moving-week feeling of formless dread! I can watch Shelter when I'm having a bad day and then feel calm enough to confront a little bit of reality before giving that a rest and watching Legally Blonde!
Self care, it is amazing. I had no idea. Because I thought I didn't need any. Hooray learning!
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<3 <3 <3
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Is it really that simple?
I've always been afraid that my characterization wouldn't hold up to that kind of scrutiny. That's part of why I can't write personal essays or realistic fiction, because I'm afraid that my subjective perceptions of the world are objectively wrong.
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But there were obvious outside/home life cues for what I was avoiding when I developed these behaviors as a kid, so it was never a mystery to me.
I just have a hard time breaking the patterns- I'm already avoiding by the time I realize what is going on.
But every day is a new day to do it better.
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And, yes! Every day!
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<3 This sounds like an excellent revelation to have had.
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Self care, it is amazing. I had no idea. Because I thought I didn't need any. Hooray learning!
I love it! *\o/*
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This has been my half-year of learning self-care, too. At the moment, my favorite method of dealing with anxiety and fear and phobias is concentrating on breathing deeply. I can't be fretting if I'm concentrating on my breath. It works for me.
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So good to see you online! And, yeah, I should work on my deep breathing. That's a good one too. I tend to live in my head and focus on soothing my thoughts rather than settling my body, which is something not to be ignored.
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