Anxiety

Nothing bad is going to happen. You seriously need to relax. I was sort of thinking that this anxiety thing was just an excuse for slacking, for getting drunk, but it's real, I stress about things a lot, I just bury it, try to forget about it, try to pretend that I just don't care, and even now, when I’m telling myself that it's all in my head, and there's nothing to worry about, I still don't believe it.

But it paralyzes me. I don't take any action because I worry about making a mistake, or the consequences, and it's all in my head. I can logically think things out, what will be the consequences of this action, and then you can logically judge whether or not that consequence is real or imagined. And doing nothing is the safest of all.

So, the anxiety comes from this tension between what I should be doing and what I’m actually doing, and also this worry about whether this is the right thing to be doing, and also just getting myself to do the thing in the first place. Like, you know, I’ve got a lot of things I could be doing right now, a lot of other things other than writing down my thoughts and trying to make sense of all of this. But this is the thing that I told myself I would work on right now, and maybe just setting up that rule, that boundary will keep me on track. I learned early on that you don’t have to do anything.

I am going to be doing the “Mindful Minute” challenge this month, so maybe that will help with the anxiety. It was one of my goals this year, to find a way to deal with the anxiety.

And I really don’t have to do anything, that’s true, and if I don’t have to do anything, I won’t do anything, but that’s unpleasant, sitting around doing nothing, but if I don’t have something to do, I have a very hard time deciding what to do, because nothing sounds appealing and everything sounds like work or effort, when I could just sit here and do nothing. Even when I’m like, well, I want to play a game, I’ll get into these spirals of “what game?” And nothing sounds appealing. I usually get a new game then, just because something new is appealing, knowing that I haven’t experienced it yet.

And that creates anxiety, especially when I feel like I should be doing something, that doing nothing is wrong, besides it’s boring, I don’t want to be doing nothing, but it’s hard to do things, and that’s why I make these detailed lists, to keep me going, keep me moving, that a list of stuff that you don’t expect to complete is actually more comforting than completing the list. Completing the list means I have to start all over again with finding something to do, only now it’s going to be harder, because I’ve gotten to that place where I don’t have to do anything, so I don’t. And don’ting is hard. It takes a lot out of me.