(Felicity, you might want to skip this one, as I talk about an incident between me and Joe)

So I am being a bad boy and ordering in and putting it on my VISA card, which is connected to my education fund, or rather, part of it.

And I will probably do it again on Saturday. Strange things happen when I am bored. Strange… and expensive.

And I am sort of soothing a wound. I had agreed to watch stuff with Joe at 6, then at 6, he seemed to have forgotten. Maybe he was just feeling anxious and depressed. I certainly know how that feels. There’s been times when I didn’t want to meet a commitment I made earlier due to anxiety.

But I do it anyway. Every single time.

So now I am dealing with a dose of disappointment, which has never been an emotion I have handle well. I suppose disappointment is the opposite of enthusiasm, and I am big on enthusiasm. I’m an enthusiastic person when the depression isn’t getting in the way and weighing me down.

So I look forward to things. And that is very good for my mood, having things to look forward to. It pulls me forward emotionally and makes me feel like life is (or at least can be) good.

But in the process, the enthusiasm fills me up like a balloon, and so when disappointment pops that balloon, I end up feeling quite…. deflated.

Sometimes my metaphors come so easily to me it’s scary.

And the thing is, it wouldn’t have been so bad if Joe hadn’t been so anxious. Like I had caught him doing something and he was desperately trying to talk his way out of it. That’s both weird and upsetting. If it was just that he forgot we’d made the plan (entirely possible, seeing as the plan consisted of me saying “see you at six!” and him saying “okay!”), he could have just said “Okay, I will be out in a minute”, or “I’ve changed my mind”. I would have been disappointed, but not upset or mystified.

And only a little disappointed.

This sort of thing shakes me up, sensitive hothouse flower that I am. Surprise, disappointment, uncertainty….. those are three of the four horsemen of my neurosis.^[1] I will be fine after time has passed and I have had something to eat, but at the moment, I am shaken.

(—)

-) One surprisingly fast Chinese food delivery later…. (-

Wow, dude on the phone said it would be 45 minutes and it was more like 20. I had hoped to be done blogging at about the same time the food came, but nope.

Oh well. The food was tasty, the meal has settled me down some, and I would presumably be totally relaxed if not for my tendency to drink Diet Coke with my meal which does a good job of boosting me into the proper frame of mine for blogging, but sometimes also makes me nervous and jittery.

See, this is why I have never trusted stimulants. I get enough stimulation from my chronic anxiety, thank you. If anything, I need a tranquilizer. Part of me wishes they still gave those out like Halloween candy like they did in the Seventies.

I would probably be a lot less healthy (there’s some very good and utterly terrifying reasons they stopped) but I would be a lot more mellow about it.

It’s weird. I have known that I have social anxiety for a long time now. Over a decade. And yet, somehow, I never thought of myself as an anxious person. I thought of myself as a depressed person. And clinically speaking, I suffer from depression with social anxiety aspects.

I only figured that out for sure recently, when reading about what people with full blown anxiety disorders go through. I have had some hard times, but it’s been nothing like that. There are people who have a dozen panic attacks a day. People whose panic trigger is far, far too sensitive, and their own body decides it’s adrenaline time without the necessity of a fear stimulus at all.

So, while I have a lot of anxieties that have been major obstacles in my life and made it very hard to function, the overriding condition is the depression. When I was a recluse who never left the apartment alone, I had almost no anxiety.

People with anxiety disorders do not have that luxury. They are never “safe”.

Today was Therapy Thursday. I told my therapist the whole story about what happened when I tried to become a Cub Scout (it’s at the end). It feels good, and right, to push that story out of my head and into the world. Like the bad shit that went down with my neighbour Donna, the Cub Scout thing is one of the very bad things that happened to me as a child, and the only way to deal with those is to drag them out of your memory and share them with others. Only then do they lose their power.

So I send my pain into the world to fend for itself. I am sure there are many more such stories lying in my memory, waiting for something to jog them loose. I look forward to it, as perverse as that might seem. It is never fun and I am still processing the Cub Scout one, but the road to mental health leads through the dark forest of painful memories that you must return to, in a safe way (after all, they are just memories, they are not really happening to you), and finish experiencing them.

Finish the moment. That should be the mantra of classical psychotherapy. Go back. Find the emotions frozen there, and experience them. They are only there because you hit the pause button on them in order to cope. You can totally go back and finish the job and move that shit out of your brain for good.

It won’t mean it never happened. Nothing can do that.

It will just mean that it is over.

I will talk to you awesome people again tomorrow.