Anxiety Level Yellow

My anxiety is up to medium today, and pretty detached. I’m not worried about anything in particular in my present life, but my brain spends a lot of time sort of reverse-engineering things to be worried about to rationalize my emotion. Often this is a sign that I’m anxious about something I am repressing, or that I did repress in the past. I’m doing okay but it’s hard to be focused on anything, and since there’s no obvious way to address the anxiety distraction feels like the most important thing I could be doing. This is all tolerable, so long as it doesn’t lead me into avoidance, but I’ll have to be careful not to be stuck here for too long. And not to let all the bits of my life that feel hard slip into avoidance while distraction feels so attractive.

Work is going okay, other than the fact that I don’t want to do any, at least not for more than 10 minutes. I skipped my meetings today but have done fine otherwise. Got through email and release processes and got some more work done on my BZ project — I’ve got all the code issues resolved and it’s now just packaging nonsense. It does not help that the dev server has python 2.6 on it. It’s like having a cell phone from 2008. I sent a test version off to the DB administrator to see if it will run on their Windows server; I’d rather just export a data file but apparently that’s not allowed.

I’m gonna try to do LI about oppression feels today in therapy. I’m not sure what the right starting event or even feel is, but I’m sick of this thing were I can’t think about oppression in my own life. It’s the same “not for me” feeling I get about lots of things, but with extra doses of societal reinforcement. Oppression of young people is ubiquitous and we’re all supposed to ignore it. But claiming any for myself makes my brain panic and shout at me about how I’m hurting someone, denying their pain, making up my own to get attention or . But I think it’s close to the root of how I feel inhuman and I want to poke at it and see if I can shake loose anything that might make my life easier.

I haven’t been super satisfied with therapy lately. In part because we haven’t been able to do LI regularly, for lots of reasons, some of them mine. LI is the only sort of therapy I’ve ever tried that actually works for me; lots of other kinds make me feel like I’m stuck explaining something sad and complicated to a therapist who either doesn’t get it or who doesn’t have anything to offer when they finally do. It easily makes me feel resentful about how I spent my time and money, and definitely doesn’t make me feel supported. Plus there’s that thing where I asked for help with a professional recommendation and they threatened state violence against someone I care about; I’m sure that’s not how they’d understand the situation — what they said is exactly what I would expect from most people in the same situation (e.g. oppression requires denial) — but that difference in understanding feels like a barrier to trust. It’s an obvious sign that my therapist doesn’t important parts of how I think and feel and it’s the sort of thing that make my brain want to take sides.

Talked to M about dogs and music and dance. About rediscovering past loves and making space for the things we want to do. Used my anxious brain to push at planning, since that’s one of the less destructive coping skills I have for detached anxiety — I need to have some sort of non-routine event planned, for days when daily life feels interminable, and I want to keep up my streak of weekend household accomplishment. Fed Dog some peanut butter since he still isn’t eating normally; to the vet tomorrow if he doesn’t recover by then. Tried a couple of times to start HA4H but found the day job easier to accomplish. I’m gonna give HA4H another shot tonight; weed will make me unmotivated (and probably tired) but also might help me peer past the barrier my twitchy brain has erected.

It’s about time to change my eyebrow piercing for the first time — any thoughts on what I try?

ZiB