This week started more anxiety driven for me than most. I found I woke up with a lot of existential dread without really being able to pin point why.
This week ended up being about finding ways to express the emotions outwardly, without necessarily trying to analyse them. Spending too much time trying to think about ‘why’ usually ends up worse rather than better.
We can get stuck in the endless frame of asking ‘why’.
I’m upset – why do I feel this way?
What do I need to change to make things better?
Is there maybe something I’m missing?
These questions can be genuinely valuable. But it’s also helpful to recognise that not everything needs a deep analysis.
I had a moment this week where I felt deep fear.
There was nothing to be scared of externally, and I knew that. But I felt fear all the same.
I am someone who has generally always kept my composure in situations. I rarely lose control. Even in moments of intense emotion, these are often calculated, deliberate actions.
But here I was in a situation where I opened up more deeply than I am used to.
Every day may be an opportunity to learn something new. But we can afford ourselves a break sometimes.
I’ve been tuning out my brain from needing to learn or do too much. Earlier in the month I spent a lot of time reading about Autism, ADHD and the like. Right now, I’m doing very little.
Sometimes our brains need time to properly digest the information we take in.
I never thought of myself as a particularly anxious person. Mainly because the idea of anxiety was something very visible and pronounced. It turns out that I just have become very good at managing my anxiety, rather than it not existing.
But in recent weeks I’ve been noticing how much unattended anxiety I’ve actually had. I don’t think this is something I’ve always had, but it’s certainly built up in the last few months. These haven’t been particularly noticeable (both to other people and myself) because my way of demonstrating anxiety is far less visible. Rather than having a visible panic attack, I tend to retreat inwards and disassociate from my body.
One of the benefits of actually listening to the anxiety rather than trying to manage it is that I’ve become a lot more cognisant of my intuition around social interactions.
My recent weeks have been plagued with fatigue. It got to the point where popping out to the supermarket a few minutes down the road would leave me struggling, and I found myself frequently needing naps during the day.
I’m in the midst of understanding what being neurodivergent means in practice. It’s a lot to navigate – there’s certainly many things that make a lot more sense now, but I’m also cautious to jump to conclusions too quickly.
I went to my doctor this week who recommended I tried antidepressants. In an ideal world, I would have had a bit more time than a short consultation to think about it. In the end I decided to give them a try.
This week I’ve been spending a lot of time in the world of fantasy. I’ve been binge watching Japanese anime, mixed up with RPG video games. I had forgotten the beauty of getting engrossed in a whole different, fantastical dimension.
But as an adult, the world of ‘fiction’ lost its appeal. In fact, I think I’ve ended up becoming quite condescending and judgemental about it
This week was the point that I realised that somewhere along the way I had lost my joy for fantasy.
Yesterday, I used my phone so much that my thumb started hurting. Not that it stopped me, I simply switched hands so I could continue tapping away.
But if it’s getting to the point that holding a phone is starting to hurt, that’s probably a as obvious a warning sign as any.
Connecting with people can be very fun, and I’ve been doing it more so than ever. But I’ve been finding that this thirst only gets stronger the more I consume. So when I stop getting messages, my body gives me a feeling of anxiety. This is the definition of an addiction.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking quite a lot around the subject of raising issues to the people around me.
I actually had something in my personal life – I felt uncomfortable with something around a social gathering. But I also felt very uncomfortable around causing a fuss for other people.
The truth is that it’s never really comfortable to raise an issue.
I finally bought a new phone. This was after five years since purchasing the last one.
I previously had a decent android which worked well. The battery started to fail me, but I got that replaced last year. When I did that, It actually felt like a new phone.
But by late last year it started to fail. Some internal overheating error meant it stopped charging at all. I basically had a phone that I could only use if it was plugged in. The ‘mobile’ part of mobile phone was lost.
So this week was time I finally upgraded. Yet, I had a moral quandary here. After all, the constant purchasing of new phones is one of the most obvious examples of needless materialistic waste.