Inside My Anxious Mind

I would like to write a little bit about my anxiety.

It's really hard for me to write about it.

I opened up to a friend recently about what it feels like to me, how I actually experience it, how this weird condition I have twists my mind emotionally. I think right now I'd rather write in specific terms than general ones. Maybe that'll help it become clear what's going on. Maybe it will help dispel my worries. Maybe it'll be cathartic. Maybe it'll be screaming into an elevator shaft and nobody'll care, which is what I mostly expect.

To really convey effectively what it's like, I guess I'll just have to write it in a steady-stream-of-consciousness. You know, once somebody commented to me that that is the style of the writing on my blog, and to be honest, that's not really *exactly* accurate; I always at least try to reread what I write, and depending on what I write, I also sometimes spend a little more time writing thoughtfully. You know, the act of writing isn't that linear. Quite often the words and ideas come to me in exactly the opposite order from what makes sense, and I have to reverse my sentences.

Brace yourselves for something new, then. This is what it's like inside my actual mind.

My fingernails are really nasty right now. I peeled off the manicure that I got last week because it kept reminding me of the terrible feeling I had trying to sit there and talk to that poor Vietnamese woman. She really seemed to be under some kind of pressure to not speak to the customer. She had been living in the United States for three years and could barely form a sentence in English. It made me feel so sad. This is the second time in my entire life I've had a manicure, and it was under considerable peer pressure. All the women on my side of the family plus Piper went to do this "great" thing together. I put great in quotes because I feel like I might be the only woman in the world who doesn't see it as some great thing. Piper had a similar experience, except I couldn't really tell whether or not she was enjoying herself. I was just nervously trying to make conversation and be agreeable, trying really hard to patiently endure it all.

I don't really want to comment specifically on the kinds of similar-to-this conversations and interactions I felt like I had to endure last week. But it was mentally exhausting for me. A lot of internal eye rolling. Which makes me feel like a pompous snob. It's not a great way to be.

I have been putting off my CGSI marketing chair duties for about two months! I feel like a total slacker. Meanwhile, I've been basically pouring my entire soul into a book writing project with a collaborator who doesn't seem to understand me very well. I am trying to be flexible and reasonable about my edits, but sometimes it can be horribly frustrating. And it's so lonely, too. It's like, here's the way I think we should fix our book. But you don't believe me. I have to prove it to you. And now my allotted computer time for the day is done, and these other less important but also more important jobs I'm supposed to do like update my blog - I swear that I've received about five emails from a collaborator in the past week, wanting to post something, and I haven't responded at all! Silence! Agh! All these other things just get shoved aside. There's a physical pile of papers and books on my actual desk, but the mountain of papers and reminders and stuff that I feel like I need to do that keeps piling up on my mental desk - that is really much, much bigger.

It seems like it is, but I know it's not.

I don't want empathy. I never said I wanted empathy. I don't want people who will sit and tell me that they understand how I feel, and give me advice about how to go through it. Why would you think I wanted empathy!? I really don't. This is bothering me. It doesn't make sense. What if I'm wrong? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I really do want empathy. This is stupid. Why don't I understand what I'm feeling? What am I looking for?

Oh, I can tell you exactly what I'm looking for. I want feedback! I don't even necessarily care if it's positive or negative - though positive'd be nice. I can understand exactly why those crazy MLM stay home mom people lost their homes and all their friends and became sucked into the "game" of sell-sell-sell these hideously ugly, overpriced, poor quality leggings. I'd never do it that way, personally, but that's just because I have a pretty strong sense of what I think is a "acceptable" behavior. That's like, way over the line. And my line is pretty generous compared to a lot of peoples'. Is it peoples' or people's or peoples's? I don't even know how to write my final s's with apostrophes. Huh. What kind of terrible linguist do I think I'll become. Kinda like I went through my entire elementary education thinking it's meant the possessive its, and nobody actually felt like correcting me; I had to find out on my own. And so it still sometimes trips me up. And it's easier to blame The System than to just accept that I can be imperfect. I just want to be perfect. 

Never. Gonna. Happen.

You know what's not acceptable behavior? You know what I really actually crave? The thing that I actually want, but was not brave enough to say outright because, for whatever reason, it broaches some kind of line of horrible awkwardness (but...writing about the awkwardness is okay? How does that make any kind of sense? Is it just another lame manifestation of my awkwardness theory in action? I don't know). What I Really Wanted was an asynchronous book club with my dearest friends. I miss them. They all live far away. I want to know their opinions. There isn't time or space to do it face to face. There isn't motivation or reason, either. 

Words girl. Just a words girl. I really care about the words. I want to read them. Do you know how horrible it was to wait, week after week for those very short lines? I wrote you pages and pages and pages. I missed you so badly. It was so difficult to wait. I think it ended up good for our relationship, but it also kind of tore an irreparable gash in my soul. Or maybe that's a crappy metaphor - maybe it'd be better to say something more like, it caused me to overvalue the written word. But maybe I've always been like this. I probably have always been like this. I don't know why I am like this. It's a stupid way to be. I don't suppose most other people care so much about the opinions and thoughts of their friends. I really want to know them.

My sisters'd never play. My brother'd never play. My husband tries but doesn't really like it. My friends...maybe Kami will agree to it. She told me once on the phone that she wishes that we could have a Book Club with *just* her and me.

"Why don't you put your thoughts and opinions about the End of Eternity on facebook? That'd be a perfect place for it."

Even I know that it's too long for that medium. And anyway, it would just serve as another horrible reminder about how people don't care about my thoughts and opinions. One or two fanatics would read it, and I'd get some kind of short comment about, "You write too much." I really hate those, "I'm overwhelmed by your enthusiasm" comments. They are not fun to listen to at all. They are deflating, horrible, HORRIBLE things. I don't want to deal with that. If I'm going to open up at all, I'd better just do it in a small, protected little space with people I care about, where I won't fail. And if I fail, it won't be quite so terrible. Or visible.

Whatever, I already failed. I guess the failure was that I didn't communicate what I wanted clearly, so I just wrote (and wrote and wrote and wrote) a long essay about my thoughts, and by simply sharing was trying to signal, "Please write me back. Let's do an asynchronous book club." But I didn't communicate it outright because the words were just too painfully embarrassing. Too painfully horrible.

I guess I'm worrying about this too much. It's pathetic. I should not worry about this. It seems to show that I care too much about it. But I do care. But I don't want to. But I don't think I care about this a lot more than other things. It's just that I basically care too much in general. This is stupid. The way I feel is stupid.

Ding. Another email into my inbox telling me what jobs I qualify for. The Most Depressing Emails of All Time. I really want a job! But I have five children and one of them is breastfeeding, two are not in school yet, and I literally do not have a career path. I don't know what the path will be. I don't know what I'm doing, or who I will become. Identity Crisis is a stupid thing to say. It's so...canned. It's not really like that. I have some direction. This is the direction.

I decided that I want to go back to school. Every time I think about it, I feel happy. It's stupid that the thing I look forward to most about going back to school is making the human connections with other likeminded people. It is the reason why the most important criterion for me is not what school, and not even necessarily what to study, but that it be a physical brick and mortar experience. I don't want my life to be so online. I want real interactions with real people who can look me in the face and notice that I actually exist and have feelings, thoughts, opinions - who will talk to me about what I am thinking. There are people like that in my world, but precious, precious few and they aren't even all...tangible. I don't want my life to be an asynchronous book club - the symbol of continually searching for meaning and connection to other humans online, but failing miserably because sometimes the words are too painfully stupid and awkward and embarrassing and x to say. Who can utter words related to computer games online? Especially when the games are so...

Well, so different. Some people play first person shooters, I play google docs? That's so lame.

So lame!

I think in this writing exercise I have by now written at least fifteen times about how lame and stupid I think I am. This is, itself, really lame and stupid. It's not going to help me feel better. And it's not going to help me change. Why do I do this? I don't know. I try to think a way out of it, but I'm not sure how to do that. It doesn't really make sense. There's huge swaths of me that don't make sense. I think I've been wearing these negativity glasses too long. I need to get up and get a drink of water, take a walk, bang on the piano or something else. 

 

Quitting Facebook on my phone has been good but in the past six months my interpersonal human connection has really plummeted as a result. I dunno, maybe it wasn't that great before. This is why I want to go to graduate school. I want people to read what I write. I want people to care that I exist. I want to be in a room with people who ask about my opinion on things. And the subject does matter. I don't actually have opinions about laser armpit hair removal, except keep it away from me - but I have a LOT of opinions about language. That matters to me. 

You know what sounds fun and really interesting, and would help to take away some of this sick and nasty pain of feeling like such a failure? At the CGSI meeting tonight, people were talking about how hard it is to get one's hands on the sole copy of the Czech genealogical dictionary that exists. It is not that great, it's pretty short, and I am really confident I could write a better one! Write a dictionary, that's pretty cocky and presumptuous. No, but for real. I am confident I could do that. What a worthy project, too!

Stop it, stop it. I can't think of new projects to start before I actually finish some of my old ones. I've basically come to the conclusion that what I really need is to find a way to increase my confidence, and while there are not a lot of concrete ways I can approach that task ("Fake it 'till you make it" is just a vague aphorism - I think it will constitute about 75% of all of it), one thing that I *can* do is try extra hard to cross the finish line on some of my projects.

There's this linguistics MOOC that I took and almost finished about 6 months ago. There's one single quiz left, plus one short project, and the final quiz. I took the quiz about 10 times, and I keep getting it wrong. There are 12 questions, the possible answers keep changing (both what they are and the order; I can't rely on visual memory), and I don't really, apparently, understand the concept. I keep getting 9 right, but I need to get 10 in order to "pass". "Passing" means a green checkbox. This green checkbox is stupid. But, these last three checkboxes would cause me to place a big check next to the class itself, which Danny assures me would really build my confidence. I did so for two other classes yesterday, and it actually *did* feel great. Like a relief. I didn't even know I was worrying about that. 

Maybe I shouldn't start so many projects. 

But then I wouldn't be me, I guess.

The reason I've been looking for a job is because we need a way to fund my graduate program. I want to be able to finish this program while my mom lives here, and in the next 1-3 years she is going to move to Utah. Probably. I don't know for sure, but that's how things look right now. I have decided that it's really important to me and our family, but especially to me, that I live close to my mother. Both my parents, really. But mostly my mom. I've never had as good a relationship with her as I have right now, and I don't want to lose it. It is one of the most valuable things in my life. I don't think she really wants to talk about linguistics or any of the things about Czech genealogy with me. But she does care about me and being physically present and available, well - it's an important thing. It's sometimes difficult to express why, because it doesn't make logical sense. But it is real. Just trust me, and believe me.

So I need a job to fund this degree, or we need to seriously overhaul our budget so that we can afford me to go to school. This is really stressful to think about - I don't want to think about it.

Especially because the jobs I qualify for with my lack of experience is just so horrid.

Because I don't actually lack experience, I lack hours in the workplace. I should say, in the paying workplace. I've been working crazy hours for years and years - more than a decade - at this stay home mom thing. And it is a lot of work! And I have some really great skills. And I've lost others. For example, I cannot even believe that I forgot that the product of two negative numbers is positive. That is something so funny that I have to say it over and over and over because it deserves to be displayed on a pedestal of my stupidity, or The System's stupidity, or something else. It's just a hilarious joke to me. A hilarious, self-deprecating joke that isn't even painful anymore, except that there are a dozen other issues with my math that are just like that.

Hence why I've been doing multiplication and division flashcards with my older kids on a daily basis. It's for them, but...it's also for me.

I actually applied for a few of the jobs, but like...well, first of all, there's probably a giant mountain of English majors interested in the kinds of TESOL jobs I want and would be good at. Also, I guess when you apply for jobs, you most often don't get them. The rejection is pretty terrible. There's all these pithy little online job opportunities which would even FURTHER limit the allotted computer time, but they just serve to reiterate: You Are Not Valuable. I don't really need more of that in my life. Danny says he's interested in working on developing some apps after he graduates in December. Maybe that'll fund my Venture Out of the Lonely Abyss. Ugh. How pathetic is it to go to grad school because you crave human interaction and don't really get enough of it at home? 

Well, it could actually be quite normal? Maybe? I am not the only one on this road. There are probably many others...

***

*That*, dear reader, is real steady-stream-of-consciousness writing by a person who is on the wrong end of the cyclical struggle with anxiety. May this round of it be over soon, and may I find a way to try to tell myself how great I am more often than I tell myself how much I suck. 

I don't think that's the solution for every person; in fact, I think it would be pretty terrible for certain individuals to further inflate their egos. But for me, I think I just really need the person inside myself to believe that I'm friendable. I have figured out that that is what I need on the outside, but how to internalize such a thing? 

Sometimes all that internal work can be knocked down with a single teasing remark by an oblivious family member. Usually teasing is okay. Except when it's not. There's this little record player in the corner of my mind with a huge stack of comments people have made to me over the years, and which I have somehow internalized. So many of them are negative. 

I need to find the ones that are positive and play those instead.