Comments (2)

1. 

   Alexander (Eddie) Stevenson-Kaatsch:
   Dec 16, 2020 at 05:07 AM

   I fully realise that irrational anxiety is a 'thing', having been to group therapy with other depressives who had that burden as well as depression. I find that we probably all have that facility locked away in our subconscious , doing its thing to find answers and give alternatives to our conscious mind. When it is encouraged of automatically surfaces and is no longer hidden, that is when our mental gearbox is open to the fresh air... not a good thing. The best I can do is offer mental escape hatches to help one out of those endless circular arguments. First of all, all this is exactly like living as we all do, under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. There's bugger all we can do about it. We might be hit by a socking great meteorite or a bus instead. There is a level of continuous risk to life and limb that one has to simply shrug your shoulders at. "Fuck all I can do to change that... I'm going to ignore it. It's just part of life." Then you get down to minutia. The times I used to go back and forth to the door to make absolutely certain I had locked it, that I had the key on me, etc, etc. I've never been broken into or even had inquisitive strangers poking their noses around my house, so now I hide a key outside in case I forget my normal one and unless I'm off for a day or more, I don't lock it normally anyway. There's no need to. I used to always be desperately chasing the time, drib hell for leather to get to places 'on time', always leaving either too late or stupidly early. Then I remembered the really ancient grandfather clock from my childhood. It had but a single hand to show the hours. None other was fitted nor needed. A few minutes either way wasn't and still isn't of any consequence. Now I usually try to have my phone with me, but use it next to never and often forget. It is my watch. I wear no other timepiece. There is no need. Then there is the fear of failure, that your plans won't work out, etc. Easy solution... don't make plans. They're only fictions laid over reality anyway. Just decide on a general direction. It gives you the excuse to divert, stop and look around, or scoot forward and ignore stuff on the way. Decisions, oh God, decisions! Which is best? Which way is shortest? Am I doing the right thing? Is 'this' ME? Should I accept that invitation? ad nausium. It was said of Churchill that one of his greatest qualities was his ability to make a decision. He said that it wasn't that critical to make the right decision, just to make one and then deal with things as they arose after you had. He was a 'good example' of how to simply get around the constant inability to plump for the best decision. Just throw a dart at the dartboard of reasonably good ideas and go down that path. In the end, it DOESN'T MATTER, not in the great scheme of things. Failure is no more than a concept, not reality. Remembering isn't going to change much at all in the universe. If you forget something, never mind. You've remembered you forgot... or you'll never recall. I doesn't matter. The world will go on perfectly fine. For my own part as a depressive of sorts, who is dreadfully forgetful and can't recall so much he needs to in life and has eight different pills to munch through every day, I know the signs of me falling off the path into, well, that sort-of insanity the pills are there to manage. Once you know, then you are in some sort of control. Often it's just not doing stuff. Not buying a thing, making a decision, arguing with people, indulging in endless phone conversation about ones dismay at the world, life and everything between. Basically, I just stop. I might read, go for a walk, go to bed, whatever, until I'm feeling balanced once more. When there are things wrong in your head, you can't trust it to steer you along until it has settled back down, so just stop and let it. If you can't sleep at night for worrying or something just keeps spinning around in your mind, get up instead. Have a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of tea. Watch some late night crap telly, read a book (have a battered old Kindle that you can get free books on if you ask it for them). You might be awake until dawn... so stay up and do your day. You'll probably sleep like a log the following night. The mind is a fickle thing. You can invent ways to trick it into doing what you want it to do. To get up when I HAVE to (appointment perhaps), I set my alarm clock and put it where I have to get out of bed to turn it off... then I'm up in my mind and stumble off to enter the day. If it takes more than that, have multiple clocks scattered about that'll pester you until you give in and arise. I have a key-cupboard. In it live 'the keys'. All the keys, all the time. I want a key? It's in the cupboard. I have a key? It can ONLY leave my hand when I hang it in the key cupboard... now I don't constantly lose keys all the time. One needs to find ways of tricking oneself to make necessary things happen. It takes away the worry. The other weird thing is that I find my internal clock will wake me up five minutes before the alarm clocks, nine times out of ten! The brain is an incredibly complex thing, but it also can be manipulated by the user of itself. You'll have to find out by experimenting, what ways you can get yourself to break circular thoughts with a certain kind of spanner in the works, how to avoid stressing over the indecisive by just plonking for a 'good enough' solution and how to redirect your mind and attention from one sort of thinking to another entirely. From a stranger's viewpoint, one who spent much of there life in long term partnerships, you become half of a whole and when it ends there's only half left and it isn't all the same half you brought into it with. You have adapted for you partner's personality, changed from what you were mostly like before. Be aware that our conscious life is our personality and it is pretty much a varnish, not 'who I am'. A slight change can crack the varnish to reveal the brute animal within. We are all killers, all great lovers, poets, fighters, whatever, under the varnish of personality. A bang on the head, too much alcohol, drugs, etc, can reveal how little it takes to become a whole new person, quite impossible to equate with whom we were before. Thus saying, asking oneself whom one is, is rather pointless. You are what you decide to be.
   1. 

      rseabrook:
      Dec 16, 2020 at 01:12 PM

      Oh, wow! Thanks for all this, Eddie - there's so much good stuff in here!
      I'm very much in agreement with your approach of accepting the way your brain works then finding escape hatches - mental tricks, whatever you like to call them - for dealing with them. I could get stuck not accepting that I have anxiety because it doesn't fit my picture of myself, but life is better if I accept that I do have it and try to deal with it. Wishing it away, or trying to fight it with willpower, just doesn't work.