This post is a form of procrastination

I’m being helped with my procrastination.

I need to log into work and actually do my job. Today is the first of the month, which means I should be sending out bills. Tomorrow, Monday, is the only day I’m officially at work next week. I’m taking vacation and having a lovely staycation. But it means that all the tasks in and around the 1st of the month must be done before I go. Which is why I planned to do some of it today.

But here we are. Today. And here I am writing about working instead of actually working.

My anxiety has been in top form for months. Pandemics and Elections have not been conducive to strong mental health. Being short on money is also not helping. I did not lose my job during this nightmare, but I have about 25 percent fewer hours. This has a corresponding effect on my income. For quite awhile now I have been slicing away at the stimulus money that I saved until it is now very low tide in the savings account. Indeed, I’m feeling like a fish caught in a tidal pool at low tide.

My county has a fund from the CARES bill that will help you pay rent. I’m well inside the income requirements, but it seems to be focused on people who are in arrears on their rent and utilities. I am not and mean not to be. Which is why I was considering applying for assistance until I can get my tax refund and replenish my savings. However, I don’t think I will get it as I am current on all bills except medical ones. Trying to avoid getting behind is not as urgent as being behind.

I need to live smaller. I used to make less and survived. But I lived a bit smaller. I need to find that small life again.

“Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

It’s rainy and blowing.

I love to be cozy in bed when it raining and am extra delighted by the wind. It’s just a feeling of cozy safety to be inside and warm in such weather. It touches on that deepest hindbrain feeling that comes from ancestors who had to deal with weather directly, living out in it. To know I am not out in it, but safe inside is lovely.

I have a tin roof over my balcony area. Rain on tin roofs is also a lovely sound. It seems to hit a note in my head that resonates nicely. Happily the place I work also has a metal roof and so I get that lovely noise quite often.

I had a lot of anxiety dreams last night. And woke up to one that kept it’s hand on my chest even after waking. In those moments, finding a thing I can deliberately delight in, is a path away from from the anxiety. I usually have to look for it. Because my mindset was already in anxiety, a significant portion of my brain wanted to consign the noise of this rain into the anxiety. But I know that I have always enjoyed that noise while in bed. So I recalled and considered that past delight until it arrived in the present.

This post is part of the process. Sometimes the delight does not come spontaneously. Sometimes it needs to be pulled out of the ground like a paleontologist pulls out a dinosaur bone. Much digging into my memory, much slow and deliberate brushing off of that remembered feeling, much consideration of where the delight belongs in the moment I’m living right now.

It doesn’t always work. But it seems to have done today. The pressure is off my chest.

Music in Headphones

There is something transformative about music when you listen to it in headphones. I suppose it’s because there is no other noise that can come in. But it seems to make the music so much richer and deeper. If you didn’t want to dance to an upbeat song, put on your headphones – it will slip inside your brain and you will be nearly unable to stop the movement your body wants to make.

I love how headphones just wall off the world. When I’m experiencing anxiety I feel like I am clawing out of my skin. But I can put on headphones and my brain will recalibrate. It doesn’t have to be music, but music is best. A podcast or novel will also work though. I think a great deal of my anxiety is triggered by sounds. Happily, it can also be silenced by sounds.

I recall reading an article about how you can see the rhythms of music in someone’s brain MRI (or perhaps it was a different sort of scan) But they could see the brains activity sync up with music. It’s an actual thing that’s happening in my brain when I retreat into the headphones.

I think when anxiety is crawling around inside me – it’s like my brain is experiencing the static that used to be seen on TVs back in the day of antennas and 4 or 5 local channels. When you turned the dial to a channel that didn’t exist locally – the screen would be this garbled and skewed grey scale chaos and the noise was a harsh static.

But when I tune into music through the headphones my brain is adjusts itself to that and the static disappears. And that uneasy crawling of unreasonable aprehension ceases.

beautiful beauty blue bright — Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

I am lucky to live in a time of headphones.

Brain Grenades

I suffer from depression and anxiety. One of the most distressing symptoms is the arrival of what I call brain grenades. These are unwanted thoughts that show up randomly in my mind. They can be memories of things that trigger a shame response, or projections of my future where everything goes wrong and I end up homeless, or imagining that everyone who “pretends” to like me is actually stabbing me in the back, or memories of failures etc.

The thing about the grenades is they arrive, explode and then I’m left with the emotional destructive chaos. And what’s worse is that once my brain has lobbed the first one, it’s likely it will keep lobbing them, in random and unrelated ways. In the first couple of years after my homelessness, I used to cry on my way to work every morning. Because my brain had decided that driving was a great time to bomb me with grenades. I finally realized that I could cut the battle out all together by playing podcasts in the car. Distract my brain and I wouldn’t end up bawling for 20 minutes on the way to work.

Yesterday I was listening to one of those podcasts, called the Happiness Lab. And it was talking about how avoiding thinking about a thing is much more likely to trigger thoughts of the thing. And as a related note – avoiding an emotion, makes the emotion come out later in more destructive ways. I had a bit of an epiphany with that information.

You see, I am something of a judgmental cranky pants at work. I get angry at the errors and bad work that other people do, which ends up on my desk. This is a new side of me. Back in the days before my brain imploded and I lost everything, I was generally patient and positive at work. I always assumed everyone wanted to do a good job and looked at errors as learning opportunities. But the aftermath of the breakdown seems to have fundamentally changed that part of my personality. It’s one of the reasons why I reject the idea that I am somehow a better person for having gone through such a traumatic experience.

I am not a fan of emotional experiences and I am always trying to tamp down and avoid them. And as a result, they spurt out at work when I see errors. I’ve long been aware that I’m worse about this at the end of the day, as I get more tired, but haven’t been able to figure out a way to not react with anger at these errors and the people who make them. I think the fact that I try to avoid emotions instead of accepting them is causing my spurts of anger.

I think I need to not focus as much on self control in the moment of the spurt as much I need to be more aware of moments when I am corralling an emotion and refusing to acknowledge it. That the emotion I avoided feeling hours before is the root of the spurt – and I’m better off just managing it rather than the eruption later.

And even more important – will it also help me eliminate the brain grenades? I cannot tell you how distressing brain grenades are to me. I call them that because it often feels like I need to find shelter from the shrapnel and on really bad days I spend most of the time on the verge of tears.

So. the new plan. Pay attention to my emotions – allow them to exist in their appropriate time. I will turn to face the emotion as it is happening, recognize it and accept it without judgement. Look at it with a bit of detachment.

Hopefully this will be successful. Because it’s not like I’m aware of all the moments I push my emotions into their boxes. But we shall see. Perhaps with more practice, one recognizes them more often.

the-longships-lighthouse

Confession: I hate the Forth of July.

I live in a city and state that allows every Tom, Dick and Harry to shoot off fireworks. And in my neighborhood, they do. They start days before, often before dark and it goes on for weeks afterwards.

Loud unexpected noises make me jump and more than occasionally scream. However, I haven’t screamed this year. In the case of the fireworks – it sets all my fight or flight nerves on edge and I end up with some irrational anxiety over things I know won’t hurt me in my bedroom.

I have one neighbor who doesn’t go for the sparkly fireworks that go off with a muted pop. He enjoys the bombs. He sets them off days before and continues straight through. And then just randomly during the summer he will get a hankering and just shoot off a dozen or so. It a nightmare.

Last night another neighbor started his fireworks at 11 pm and kept it going to 1 am. Thankfully it was all sparkly muted pops. But still – its a bit much.

Then there’s the guy who in the midst of the biggest mess of fireworks going on all over the damn city pulls out a gun and starts shooting in the air. Now, I know I’m being a killjoy here, but bullets shot straight up have to come down somewhere. People have died that way too. And that doesn’t even account for the blood alcohol level of someone handling a live weapon. Well. Lets face it. I am a killjoy.

I don’t make a thing about it to anyone who is enjoying their family fireworks. I just complain to friends and write a whining blog about it.

I just think that in a sane world – fireworks would only be handled by professionals. And set off in public places far from me.

Grouchy Sara is grouchy.

ANNOYED HUSKY

It’s been a very busy week. Very stressful. And it was capped today by a mistake by omission that sent me home in near tears.

We are putting in a new software system and I have been given quite a lot of extra responsibility with that. And since it’s implementation was supposed to be Friday, the last week was fraught with various glitches and various things not done. All while my full time job was not done by me with any great focus.

In the end we did not go live on Friday because there were too many roadblocks. I was relieved because a good portion of my responsibilities on it were unfinished.

To add stress and work to this, Friday was the monthly close for billing. On the 1st I am normally putting in at least a 10 hour day. But due to the system it was just impossible to even get done, after my 12th hour. So. I left and came back today.

Needless to say, I have set aside a whole lot of non-urgent tasks during the last month. And one of them was a contract my boss gave me to read. It outlines the new rates etc for our biggest client. I read it today. After I sent the invoices, which were based on a conversation I had with my boss on how much the fares were. I don’t know if I misunderstood him or if the contract was not written to his verbal agreement, but it specifies a whole different rate structure than I billed at. And it doesn’t matter what he or I understood, because what he signed says these things.

When I say it’s our biggest client, I had 1500 line items on one invoice and 600 on the other. And all of it is wrong. I have pull it apart and redo it. Then apologize profusely to their AP folks.

I couldn’t face it and I walked out tonight on the verge of tears. I called my coworker and she talked me off the full on breakdown. She’s good at that. I might go in tomorrow. Because Monday is going to be yet another day of system issues and I won’t have time to do it.

But I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Last time I felt this shitty was when I literally stopped moving, lost my job, and after exhausting my savings became homeless.

On a positive note though, I notice I’m handling it better this time. I have tools to deal with it, I guess. Last time I refused to acknowledge it. Because I had a great life, I couldn’t possibly be depressed or anxious.

But now I see what’s happening and have more tools. I am better prepared and more aware of it. When the feeling of near breakdown was worst was the beginning of this week, I just sat myself down and realized I had to let things go. I had to stop internalizing things I couldn’t control and recognize the limits of what I could do in the space time I was allotted. . And after that, things got a lot easier. Although I’m still prone to snapping at people, and all of my coworkers recognize that I’m a bit overwhelmed, I’m not internally as ready to just curl up into a ball and not participate. Which was how I was at the beginning of the week. And how I was when I fell apart years ago. Back then I did just curl up and stop participating. But I won’t do that this time.

I won’t let this kill me. I’m fighting for my own sanity this time. Maybe the odds don’t look in my favor, but I think I got this.

serenity-movies-summer-glau-firefly-river-tam-screenshots-desktop-2117x900-hd-wallpaper-855869

Work and Kittens and Medical Tests

So I changed jobs a couple of months ago. Same company, different department. I work in Billing now. Accounting. It’s fun to learn new things. The actual job though is often tedious. However because they are working in a crazy old fashioned system and because the people who work in the department aren’t really trained bookkeepers (myself included) it’s all kind of crazypants. Yesterday we discovered a rather large error that made my stomach hurt as I was auditing the bill and finding more and more not right.

I am a LONG WAY from perfect in my work life, but I have this ideal of what things SHOULD BE. And sometimes I internalize it, so when I see a mess like that it makes me stressed even when I’m not the person who made the mess. Maybe more so out of empathetic stress for the person who quite unwittingly caused the problem. Because I’ve never met anyone who deliberately messes up. We all want to do our jobs well.

I feel like we need to change things up on how we process the work, but I’m the new girl so it’s definitely not my place to direct that and I’m not even sure what would be the best solution. So.

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The kitten is a panter. Like a dog pants. He runs around like a banshee and then jumps on my lap panting. It’s SUPER adorable. But it’s odd too. I mean I’ve seen cats pant, but generally it’s rare. Tim pants daily. Probably several times a day. After each session of zoomies he’s panting. I’m wondering if there is something wrong or if that’s just his little quirk.

So naturally I looked it up. The list of potential medical issues is very disturbing. I am now considering taking him to the vet. Because even though it’s only after exercise, it’s also ALWAYS after exercise. We can’t have him be sick. It’s not allowed. He’s the young one. Also Bijou and I have grown exceptionally fond of the little brat.

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So, I’ve been having chest pains. Daily. I’m fairly sure it’s anxiety, but it’s there. And I have other risk factors. My father and both grandfathers died of heart disease. I’m overweight. I have high blood pressure that I control with meds. I don’t exercise. I eat terribly. I’m basically a walking statistic. So I told the doctor on my last check up. She ran an EKG in the office and there was one odd thing on it that could or could not mean something.

So she ordered a stress test with echo. I scheduled it. And then they called me to tell me that insurance wouldn’t cover that test. How nice. My doctor specifically told me she was ordering that test because it is much better at catching heart issues in women. But I guess it’s more expensive and so now I have get a different, no doubt inferior, test. This has naturally led to more anxiety and chest pains continue. I don’t get the test for a couple of weeks because that’s how the urgent things work in health care.

Still, I think if it was my heart I would be dead already because it’s literally daily for periods of an hour or more. So it’s probably anxiety or possibly it’s GERD. We will see. Or not since I’m getting an inferior test.

everything is fine

Doing the Things that Work

The human brain is a lot like Alice’s Wonderland. There are lots of things that are weird and wonderful about how it works.

Many experiments show how easily our brain can be tricked. This week on podcast Invisibilia, they featured a story about how putting on a doctor’s coat makes people perform significantly better on attention tests. They ran the test in a variety of manners to see if it was fabric or the weight of it on your shoulders by changing up what they told people it was or the color and they found – it was the IDEA of wearing a Doctor’s coat that made people feel more focused and attentive to detail. The same coat described as a painters coat ruined the effect.

That is kind of creepy. That we don’t decide to be attentive, but our brains are suddenly and without direction, acting in that way because of the ideas that are associated with a coat. Our brains are changed by things outside of our intentional thought. More than that – they are more changed by things outside of our thoughts than inside of our thoughts. Because the control group in the above experiment were intentionally trying to do well on the test and failing.

How many things are affecting our brains in ways we don’t know. How can we know about what is affecting our brain? It’s apparently invisible. And since there are lots of experiments that show that we do things and then make up the reason for it later, it’s possible we really don’t know.

This is also very liberating. It’s like being handed the key to maze. Just find ways to trick yourself into being a certain way. Wear the right clothes or create the right environment or whatever. The key is to find the things that will make your brain act in a way that benefits you. No matter the reason.

I live in a housing program that was designed to keep mentally ill people from being homeless. I got this housing because I was homeless 3.5 yrs ago due to nonfunctional depression. This housing is a safety net for me. Because for 3 years I’ve been terrified that I will fall backwards back into the hole of nonfunctional depression and I will lose my job. But I knew that even if that happened, they wouldn’t evict me, they would just adjust my small subsidy to something that would keep me inside instead of outside.

I recently got a large raise at work and this put me over the income threshold of the housing and so I must move. My initial reaction was a bit of panic. But then a friend on tumblr talked me down and reminded me of doing things in small steps. So I forced myself to open a spreadsheet and I put down all the steps and calculated how much it would cost and figured out a plan. And the anxiety, which was on the edge of panic attack subsided. I think it wasn’t the thoughts that changed. It was action. The idea of doing something in an organized and controlled manner made my brain change track into a new way of being. I wasn’t helpless and afraid now.

I’m still fully aware of all things that made my brain start toward panic on reading that notice. But I’m no longer afraid. I’m just on a plan toward a new home. Hopefully one I will love.

I’m going to try to trick my brain more. I know that my own thoughts don’t change my mental landscape that much. But it seems that certain actions and apparently environment and even clothes will. So. New Plan. Whatever Works.

How I get things done with depression/anxiety.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

~John Keats

That is what depression is for me at its worst. Its apathy of the greatest and most destructive sort and when its manageable its a fight to gain enough traction to move.

When its manageable, I have to set up systems or I won’t win. These are methods, tricks, processes I use to get myself to do the simple everyday tasks that you do without much thought.

The best systems are habits. For example, my morning routine includes things that are habit. I clean the kitty litter every morning before I leave for work. I take out the trash when I leave the apartment. They just happen without much thought. And once the habit is there, it has to be a very bad day indeed to stop the habit.

But some things are just not tasks you can turn into a habit. For example, I’m not going to vacuum my house daily.

So I set up a list of tasks that I will do. The items on the list are not huge. It does not say for example: Clean the Bathroom. It says clean the sink. Clean the toilet. Sweep the floor. Mop the floor. Clean the tub.

Then I set up a timer. The timer is set for 45 minutes or an hour. When it goes off I do a task for 5 minutes or until its done, whichever is first. Then I reset the timer. If I don’t finish the task, it has to be finished when the timer goes off next.

When I do that all day, I get a clean apartment, clean clothing, etc.

The thing is that nothing on the list is overwhelming. And nothing on the list takes more than 5 minutes in normal circumstances.

Another thing I do is time how long it takes me to do onerous tasks. Cleaning kitty litter used to be a bugaboo of mine. I used to put huge blocks in my mind around it. So one day I timed how long it took. 45 seconds. It stopped being onerous when I realized it took less than a minute of my life. Sometimes my brain creates disproportional views of things – and taking a simple step like timing it creates an objective ruler to break into my misconception.

I want to create more habits. Routines that get done daily. However starting and sustaining a routine for long enough to become a habit is hard. My attempts have been failures so far.

Depression is not a static thing. It changes daily and even hourly. Its on a continuum. Sometimes I just don’t move. Stillness. I can’t even get out of bed to go to work. I’m nonfunctional. There is no hope at all to exercise willpower. Its not even in my list of options.

Sometimes I’m functional. And if I pull out the mental whip and beat myself with it I can get some basic things done like going to work. Its a weird terribly unhealthy way to get myself to move.

Sometimes I functional and hopeful. And in those days I work with systems and goals..

Today I’m functional and hopeful. Today is a good day.

Good Morning from Lily & I

lily computer I had lots of exciting plans for this weekend…

OK. Exciting might possibly be hyperbole. I had plans. To organize and clean and cook.

And now the lifesucking weekend is here and I can already feel it is going to be a battle.

I may be the only person in the world who does not like weekends. Or to be more precise – days off.

I need days off. But when they arrive I stop moving. And all productive things happen only if all the stars align, if I implement a process of timers and lists and and my brain isn’t using the ONE RING* to ruin my life.

My life is a strange dichotomy. At work, I’m very productive. I do things both required and not required. But when I leave work, it all falls apart. I want so much to transfer the way I am at work to the rest of my life. But I have yet to figure out the way to do that.

To be clear – depression/anxiety doesn’t disappear at work. I still struggle with focus and make ridiculous mistakes because of it. I have elaborate quality check processes because of this.

I still isolate at work. I keep my back to the room, and don’t socialize much when I’m at work. People will talk to me and I will respond with my back to them. I’m not acting like a normal person there.

But I do get things done. And I mostly don’t get stuff done at home. I sit in bed all day, playing on the internet or reading.

Anyway, I’m going to begin the battle to make things happen today. First the list.

Tag: anxiety