In my day we'd just turn the wireless up and get on with it

[cosmolinguist]

I don't remember the racing/intrusive thoughts being that bad before.

Last night when I was trying to sleep it felt as if my brain were entirely full of unwelcome thoughts. Whatever subject I darted to in my head, as if I were physically running from one room to another in a big house, was full of unwelcome and painful things. There were monsters everywhere and no way to get out.

The thoughts were not necessarily dangerous or negative: they seemed random -- I was fixated for a while on objects from my dead grandparents' house: their dining room chairs, the blankets I slept under when I stayed overnight, bizarre things -- but everything left me in mental anguish, or maybe it was merely the unstoppable nature of the thoughts that was upsetting me.

I wanted nothing more than to unplug my brain, pull out this personality cartridge from the back of my head, and go limp in a mechanical mimic of the sleep that was eluding me.

The new job* is great (thankfully! it'd be horrid to be stuck in something dreadful at a time like this) but everything else is tiring, overwhelming, sad, infuriating...

Yet I am not depressed in the way I usually get, proving again if proof be needed that depression is not just sadness or having a bad day or dealing with a bad event in life. I am if anything anxious, physically restless as well as mentally like last night. I'm grinding my teeth, which hurts, and in trying not to am biting my lips and tongue and the inside of my mouth (almost all without being aware of it), and tensing my jaw muscles so they don't clamp down. The upshot of all this is that the bottom half of my head is constantly in enough pain that I consider it one of the worst of my constellation of anxiety symptoms.

Even my usual attempts at escapism aren't working nearly as well as they usually do: rocket launches, sunshine, friends, beer, food...nothing is distracting me or putting a smile on my face. Sometimes when I'm like this I choose to do tasks I usually hate, like cleaning the house, because at least I'm not going to ruin a good mood by doing so. And there are certainly plenty of unloved tasks on my to-do list now, so I suppose I should get on with them.


* I finally got around to telling my mom about it; her only question was "Do you have to dress up, wear particular clothes or anything?" I fumbled the question -- trying to imagine my two co-workers caring at all about what I look like is impossible -- so she had to reassure herself: "Well I guess you wear dresses a lot anyway..." Just for that, I want to keep wearing trousers -- what a silly thing stubbornness is, eh?

Comments

[sfred]

Thinking of you.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm tempted to ask, "But why does she care about that?", but I suspect I know...

I don't have a better answer than you -- that's just what she's like. But also, my mom loves shopping, she absolutely adores it, and my line of work is pretty much alien to her so I think she didn't have any better way to engage with me on the subject than to talk about clothes.

And she also is very invested in how I look.

I do find knitting phenomenally useful when I'm like this; because insomnia so often goes along with my anxiety I am usually very tired, and yet so restless. Knitting is a basically-sedentary activity but keeps my hands moving (and can engage my brain to whatever extent that is good for me at that time). The only problem is that I have found myself lately using that as a procrastination technique, and I do have a lot to do so I'm trying not to give in to it. I'd just spend the time doing it thinking miserably about everything I should be doing instead.

[cosmolinguist]

A friend has asked me to make her some headbands -- she wears these wide bands in her hair to keep it tucked back at the sides. Some are just stretchy ribbed things (I just finished one of those today, and sewed some colorful buttons o it), some are so complicated as to have increases and decreases so they're thinner on the part that goes under your hair at the back of your head; I've borrowed one of these from her to try to copy, and that's my next project.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I would love some, too.

And as far as your mother, you could tell her you want knitting accessories, or yarn. (And then if you really don't want them YOU CAN GIVE THEM TO ME!) ;)

I am (only half) tempted to tell you to tell her to adopt my children as her grands, if she's so determined to by someone stuff.

[cosmolinguist]

I regularly get yarn, from her sister. It's such a pain in the ass, shoving that into my suitcase. I have a lot left from last year, because I get it more quickly than I can use it; it's cheap acrylic stuff that I don't like to make clothes out of because it's not nice on my skin; I've got a bag and I'm working on a blanket but mostly it just takes up space. Anyway, I'm sure there'll be more of that this year. Which is okay; I should do more knitting than I have been lately.

She loves buying things for kids. My parents would actually make really awesome grandparents (I do realize this is not a reason for me to have kids -- it was supposed to be Chris's job to do all that white-picket-fence stuff, dammit -- but it is still true).

There are worse ways I could break the poly news, I suppose, than "yes but look, LITTLE KIDS TO BUY STUFF FOR!" And if you're ever in the area, she likes to babysit too ;)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

OMG. Why did I not consider this as a poly sidebenefit?!

You can mail the stuff in a flatrate box or two from the airport if you plan this right. ;) I can try to find you some liberal charities that make afghans or something.

[k425.livejournal.com]

"Do you have to dress up, wear particular clothes or anything?"

My answer to that always is "well, they like me to wear shoes when I'm outside my office. But otherwise, as long as we turn up dressed there's no actual dress code".

[cosmolinguist]

Mine was gonna be "whatever's good when I'm commuting by bike" but this is so at odds with how my mom thinks (I am surprised to hear that she thinks I dress up regularly, but then she thinks any dress or skirt, however unlovely, is more "dressed up" than any pair of trousers, however smart, and since I do mostly wear skirts and dresses, especially in hot weather which is how she most recently saw me, and since this is such a shock to her because it was so hard to get me into a skirt or dress when I was younger, I guess it's made an impression on her), that I didn't see the point of disabusing her of that notion to replace it with something she's more likely to disapprove of.