Doing More

Today I woke up anxious. Even half asleep I was busy trying to guess the “right” way to moderate certain interactions, or react to possible occurrences. Nothing real – the decisions that felt so important to my anxiety are mostly just the random predictions of partial consciousness – but that doesn’t make it any less stressful. I wish I could at least let my sleepy time brain have a break. It’s not every day but it’s often enough I’d like to change it. I feel like my day would go better if my brain didn’t start at stress level 24. It makes getting back to sleep hard on days when I’m up early. It makes getting started with work or whatever seem hard, and it makes distraction easy. Sometimes it even makes work into a distraction, which can be technically productive but doesn’t help me feel better.

Watched @FD play Slime Rancher for half an hour, which helped a bit. Her externalized anxiety makes me less interested in distraction. I got to my noon meeting and actually into the office for my 2:30. Got my oldest SRs updated and cleared most of my inbox from last week. I promised to do a specific thing tomorrow – testing the FW bug – but it’s also the only non-meeting thing I’ve got planned so it seems plausible. I think I’ll call into my morning meeting though, so I don’t feel like I blew my work load on sitting in a mostly empty conference room with my boss and waiting for the bus.

Did some gym research today. Ofit would be a cheap and is just a couple of blocks from my office. They don’t seem to have a lot of equipment but it would probably be fine for a few weeks. But they don’t answer the phone so I don’t know their discrimination policies. The Seattle Gym agrees to only discriminate against people under 16, so that might work too, though they’re more interested in membership scams. It looks like they’ll give me a 3 day trial though, so at least for one week they’d be fine, even if I have to hike up the hill a bit. So I’m still not being quick about gymming but I’m doing better than last week when I did no work at all.

I was thinking about how I have trouble deciding that I’ve done enough of, well, anything. At least anything that feels like work. I could always do more, and stopping before I pass out always feels like I’m not doing enough ¹Which is bad enough for unpleasant things like work but also sometimes a problem for drugs or food or thing I enjoy. If I’m anxious it’s easy to feel like no amount is sufficient, and like I can use excess like to save up for the future. I won’t have to waste time eating tomorrow, or even thinking about eating, if only I do enough right now. … Continue reading. @Simone talked today about being too “hockey dad”²She’s Swedish so I assume this is some sort of idiom that she translated literally, but it made perfect sense to me. I took it as the idea that pushing harder is always better, that it’s not really success unless it hurts, that you shouldn’t stop until something makes you. That’s great survival advise but it’s less great for recreational … Continue reading at herself, which sounds about right it me. It’s one of the reasons home improvement projects feel impossible sometimes – because I can’t just do them for 20 minutes a day, I have to keep doing them unitl they are “done” and I can go back to avoiding thinking about them.

I’m trying to do better with planning on two fronts. The first is to review my To Done list, which often contains a while series of important things I did but didn’t have in my plan. This helps me see what I actually accomplished instead of just the only-half-done checklist from the Plan. The other – and I would recommend this to anyone who is having trouble getting started on a task – is to plan work based not on accomplishments but on time. I don’t need to be done with the task, I just need to work on it for X minutes and then I can stop.

For some things X might be an hour or two, but for hard things make X real short. Don’t tell yourself you’re gonna sit down and finally put in those 6 hours of work you have needed to get done for a week, just start with 4 minutes and see how it’s going. Getting started on a 4 minute task is much easier, and often you’ll be able to keep going without much effort. And if it’s still hard after 4 minutes you can stop and reevaluate – how long this will really take, how hard it will feel, how important it is to you.

Time-based planning is also a good trick for “quick” things you keep putting off. Schedule 3 minutes of time to actually get started. You can do almost anything for 3 minutes. Even things that are hard and you hate and that are painful and triggering. Pick a time today to work on it for 3 minutes and after 3 minutes just stop and ignore it again if you want. Maybe it’s done in 3 minutes. Maybe it’s 1/4th done and you only have to do this a few more times to be actually done. Maybe it was so bad you decide to give up and never do it again. But all of those are better than being stuck. Better than being forever anxious and distracted and disappointed in your ability to direct your own life. All of those are progress and progress is all we can ever really hope for.

I spend a lot of time thinking about other people’s feelings. The concept certainly isn’t news to you – obviously I spend time a non-trivial amount of time thinking about and writing at you – but I wanted to give it some perspective, for myself if nothing else.

It’s a thing I’m doing almost all the time. Unless I’m in a heightened emotional state it usually doesn’t distract me from focused tasks, but it is often the first thing I go back to as soon as my focus blurs. And it’s a thing I’m doing in the background almost anytime I’m not focused. I’m doing it about all the people in the room – people I see during meetings, while I consume media, when I’m waiting for the bus. I do it about the people I’m going to see later, the people I’m going to write to, the people I wish I could see. I’m doing it about more than one person at a time, or in the same context for each of several people to consider how it seperately applies to each of them.

And mostly I like it. I like thinking about you, imagining what I’m going to share and how you might react. How I can communicate safety and care to you. Speculating about how you are feeling about the parts of your life I can see and using your feelings to speculate about the parts I cannot. It often makes me feel useful and gives me hope that I might learn to feel connected. It makes me feel like I know how to communicate my love.

But it’s less clearly good when I do it for people I’m less close to. Obviously I should spend some time thinking about all people in general, at a variety of scales, and specifically about the one I interact with even if our interactions are mostly superficial. If I don’t think about theor feelings I’ll sometimes be cruel or harmful without even noticing, and I’ll be less good at understanding the world.

Still, I think there’s a “too much” version of thinking about other people’s feels, and that it’s easy for me to be there. That I can sink a lot of energy into modeling people that I don’t have much influence over and don’t get much support from. I think that’s one of the reasons meetings at work feel so hard at times, because I can’t always be focused enough on the technical content to keep myself from paying a lot of attention to other people’s feelings. It’s really hard for me to even want to dial it back, let alone to actually do it. My fear of becoming a narc tells me that I must always treat everyone with as much kindness and consideration as I can muster. My fear of not being enough makes me feel like what I can muster is never sufficient. And my survival fears tell me I need as much information as possible about other people in case I need to manage their feels or otherwise protect myself from them.

I used to be real worried about managing other people’s feels. For 20 years I did it full time for like 4 people (and put many of mine on hold for the nonexistent future where I had time for them) and it was not easy to stop that or avoid injecting it toward others. Today I’m pretty careful about the line between acknowledging someone’s emotions and directly managing them – I only do the managing part if their emotions are preventing me from doing what I need AND I am intentionally keeping a big emotional distance from me. Like if someone is in crisis and I need to compel their technical cooperation on some shared goal, or to make sure my boss isn’t overwhelmed by his bad read of my behavior – cases where I’m okay with the fact that we don’t really understand each other but still need to work together.

But I’m less good at turning off the skills that let me do that. Or the compulsion to understand everyone’s feels even if I don’t intend to do anything about them. Even if I don’t intend to ever think or talk about or interact with that person again. It’s a thing that sometimes lets me shout a feeling at someone that has an import impact on them. It’s a thing I probably can’t stop even with help and practice. But I think it would still be worthwhile to be able to adjust the volume. To be able to dial it down in some of the situations where life demands I have transient or transactional interactions, where my participation is required but my emotional investment is not, where the other party isn’t thinking about me at all and doesn’t care that I’m not thinking about them.

It’s difficult for me to gauge the right level of concern. Until very recently I imagined that my ideal life would leave no one ever thinking of me – not the people closest to me, not acquaintances, not strangers – let alone considering my feelings. At the same time I do it obsessively. Presumably there’s a balance to be had, but I’m not sure I even own the right kind of scale to measure it.

How often do you think about other people’s feelings? Or mine for that matter? How do I know if it’s safe and normal and kind enough to dial back my concern? If I did figure out how to step back, what would trigger me to adjust back up? I other words, what does caring about people look like in a world where there’s a difference between strangers and spouses? I have no childhood experience to judge from and while treating everyone the same is great for making me a good citizen of the world it is terrible for helping me get support. It’s terrible at letting me live a life I can sustain.

I did get the hooks up today [fig 1], with only a medium amount hassle. It’s a minor project but one that’s easy for me to put off forever specifically because it’s small. In any case I now have a spot for my purple jacket, and it doesn’t have to overlap with the dog bits. I also made good progress with Eggsy’s care package. I decided to scale back the construction part of it in favor of careful logistics because the 3D nature of the pieces made it complicated. I think other aspects of it will have enough impact on their own, so I’m pretty happy with the new plan too. And glad it will be ready soon.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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