Dear Life

Dear Life,

I know that I am at the end of my prescription and at the end of refills until I see a doctor again. I embrace the vertigo and sluggishness of not being able to take my pills for a couple days in a row. I drag myself out of bed on days when it’s the last thing I want to do, or something I wouldn’t mind doing it if I didn’t feel so profoundly and inexplicably unready to get up. I accept that sometimes my job is crazy and I have to do my best to just laugh at it instead of taking it personally. I agree to make plans even when it feels like everything is piling up and I have so much to worry about doing, especially in light of the fact that it’s not actually that much and the feeling of being overwhelmed is just there for other reasons.

It sucks, but I am meditating and drinking plenty of water and trying.

Love,

Me

Monday Musings #15 — Anxiety, Horror, Zen

Do you follow Zen and Pi? There’s a newsletter associated with the blog that I’ve subscribed to and read, eventually. Today I didn’t feel like getting it if bed right away and it was one of the most recent Unread things in my email inbox. So I opened it.

There are always links to interesting reads at the end. I have to admit that I don’t usually click on most of them, and when I do it’s somewhat haphazardly. After all, I usually have a lot of blog post notifications from the blogs in subscribed to waiting in my inbox to be read as well. But today I saw this and clicked immediately: “Horror movies for anxiety?”

One of the hurdles I had to get over in order to ask my doctor about anxiety medication was simply that thinking about how long I have been living with anxiety makes me uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, I went from relatively extroverted to an introverted bookworm at some point just before or during fourth grade. By sixth grade I was a huge Stephen King fan, my favorite movie was Jaws, and vampires that are actually scary became (and for the most part continue to be) my favorite type of humanoid monster. So reading this article about how many people with anxiety self-soothe with horror at first made me uncomfortable because it points out something I’ve been doing for longer than I’d like.

#25 – Sunday, July 3

“What irritates me, is when people, well meaning of course, say things like “I know things seem really hard right now but it will help if you can muster up some gratitude for everything that you do have.” In my mind, what I hear is admonishment: aka stop complaining. It gives me an instant twinge of annoyance like an electrical shock because it isn’t helpful advice.

Here’s the thing—being reminded to be grateful when you’re having an emotional breakdown is a little like being reprimanded for crying too long when you skinned your knee as a kid. The message is that it’s not okay to hurt or express frustration. It’s not okay to ask, in your own roundabout way, for help to process what’s happening for you. … We want to believe this stuff works because we want to feel better. But the real shift isn’t going to come from memorizing platitudes and trying to follow along.

The real shift happens when we become aware of what’s holding us back from being able to follow the advice in the first place.” (x)

Look closely for the dangling power lines and the tree in the road.

I’m grateful for…

🐢 – Getting a haircut. I had her take off probably at least three inches to just off my shoulders. Bring on summer.

🐢 – That falling tree not landing on my car.

🐢 – Those power lines not falling in on my car or electrocuting me after I got out.

🐢 – Generally not being dead after a tree fell down behind me and the power lines fell down in front. That was a weird mix of bad luck and good luck.

🐢 – Remaining calm when I nearly died.

Sunday Gratitudes #23

“Making gratitude practice a habit, making it part of my everyday routine, is the most effective step I’ve taken to bringing more happiness into my life. It’s simple and it’s powerful and by creating a meaningful gratitude practice you will put happiness at the heart of your life too.” (x)

(source)

I’m grateful for…

🌼 – The beautiful cottage rental we saw over the weekend! Knock on wood.

🌼 – My parents going out of town and lending me my mom’s minivan while I deal with the fleas.

Literally my Worst Nightmare

What is your worst nightmare? The thing that makes your skin crawl and stomach flip over just thinking about the possibility that it might actually happen? I don’t know how many people can easily and accurately answer that question without having to stop and think… And last week I might have said that I’ve got too much anxiety to be able to sort out my top nightmare. I know what it is now though, because it happened on Tuesday.

My nightmare is being covered in bugs.

Haiku

Goldfish to good times,

I’m an elephant to bad times.

Please let it reverse.

A to Z Challenge #23 — Wham

Wham.

That’s just how I feel sometimes. It’s the other side of the coin from the feeling that the other shoe is going to drop.

A to Z Challenge #21 — Underwater

As any full-time glasses wearer knows, seeing underwater is only a thing if you can keep prescription swim goggles from fogging up.

This is not my strong suit, so I have a long history of being that dork in the swimming pool still wearing her glasses.

Seahorse farm in Hawaii, 2010

… There was more to this post, and some people have commented on it, but for some reason the internet has decided to eat it. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote before, but the upshot is that I’ve been driving along the Great Highway in San Francisco a lot lately and it has crept into my WIP novel.

I’m a nervous driver. On long, stressful drives through the city I’ve gotten in the habit of visualizing it underwater. Tall clumps of kelp forrest instead of the tall trees between the road and the ocean along some sections of the coast, like in that several-story viewing window at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Slow, syrupy currents instead of brisk winds. And maybe part of all this is that I’ve always wished I could see clearly underwater, but between either chlorine or salt and my poor vision that’s difficult to achieve.

So in my novel, where the sea level has risen quite a bit, the characters are going to visit a submerged San Francisco.

A to Z Challenge #18 — Random

I believe in a random, “it is what it is” universe. It is value neutral. It just is. Things like luck and fate exist, but they’re never for or against you — they just are what they are, acting on whatever you are.

There’s a song by Motion City Soundtrack that caught my ear the one time I ventured out to Warped Tour at the Shoreline in Mountain View, sometime between 2006 and 2009. I’m no longer sure if I actually heard this song performed or if I didn’t listen to it until later, on the CD I bought there. The line is,

“They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you who you are.”

And I thought, yes. Because there are a lot of things that don’t kill you, but don’t make you stronger, either.

A to Z Challenge #6 — Friends

The problem with going from West Coast to East Coast for school, and then moving back to the West Coast afterwards, is that all my friends are all far away now. My college buddies are mostly back east, which I can’t afford to visit very often, so we’ve mostly fallen into or respective busy lives and out of touch. Meanwhile, while I was gone my pals from high school drifted off to other cities or states, and I’ve lost touch with them too.

As an introvert with anxiety problems I have a hard time reaching out… But by the time I work myself up to it my attempt tends to be too little too late, and/or they have their own stuff to deal with and don’t stay on top of getting back to me. No judgement, it’s just sad.