2020 has been one hell of a year so far, and oddly enough, I’m beginning to feel like it is much worse for me than I perceive. Yeah, things suck. Everyone is dealing with it. It’s been a year of negative feelings, physically and mental. Money problems, physical issues, mentally struggling. It is easy to blame it all on ‘2020’.
It feels as though the constant one-upping of how insane this year has been is distracting me mentally from the true enemy of my happiness, and in reality, is probably saving me from it. I worry that without this world chaos, I would still be suffering as I am right now, without a good scapegoat to blame. That truly would suck.
I guess the facade falling down in real time as I type this kind of negates the whole distraction argument. Not in a ‘it never was a distraction’ kind of way, but in a ‘now you know what’s really going on, so you can’t blame the insanity anymore’ kind of way. I’m facing headlong into the storm inside my mind and honestly I don’t think I’m ready for it, but I opened up this can of worms so there isn’t much I can do about it right now. Self reflection and deeper realizations are a bunch of bitches.
So enough exposition, what the hell is going on?
In simple terms, I worry that my perception of reality is beginning to become skewed at times. I already know I’m (jokingly) insane, but I’m starting to think I’m actually insane. I deal with a lot of nonsense. Before we get into the deconstruction of my mental state, let’s go over some of the lighter issues I currently assume I deal with. I am my own worst judge, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Constant anxiety is a fight every day, whether it’s driving somewhere, waiting for or responding to a message, planning out the next few days, even just trying to go to sleep. We all get anxious about things, but most people don’t get anxious about nothing. Some days it’s completely fine. I may be a bit nervous about something specific but that’s normal. Other days, I am just a ball of human shaped goo, struggling to get out the car to walk into work, loathing the moment I have to talk to someone. When I do, it’s fine, but the anxiety leading up to it is bone breaking. I always feel like I’m walking on ice when talking to people. One small slip up or one misplaced word will literally cause all of my friends to hate me and leave me forever. It’s happened before, and that kind of ruins me. I get the notion of ‘well if they were really your friends…’ and all that, and the majority of my worry is not based on evidence that these people would ACTUALLY do that, but it doesn’t make it any easier. Being nervous is standing in line for a new roller coaster, anxiety is breaking down crying while in line for that roller coaster because you think you may have left the oven on at home and it is now burning down your house and all your stuff is destroyed, despite the fact that you haven’t used your oven in a week. Anxiety is not logical, anxiety is not rational, but unfortunately, anxiety controls a lot more than you can. Anxiety makes me assume the absolute worst when I do things. Literally walking into a store, I worry that if I am walking weird, they are obviously going to think I am stealing something, and then me being nervous and awkward is going to make it worse, so I make an effort to ‘look normal’ which is probably what people who are actually stealing are also doing. It’s easy to point out how ridiculous that is now, but in the moment, it is much harder to detect.
A tie-in to the anxiety is my self confidence… or hilarious lack thereof. If you take 100 swings at a baseball pitch and miss every single one, you may start to think that, ya know, you may not be that good at baseball. I have a few things I KNOW without a shadow of a doubt that I can do and do well, but the rest, well I basically just suck at it. My low self confidence makes me seem lazy. I get asked to do something for someone, especially for money, and I usually turn it down. Why? Because something tells me that although I can do that thing and do it well, something I do is going to anger or disappoint the person, and I just can’t handle that. The anxiety kicks in and makes up this hilariously unrealistic scenario, which eventually tells me that I absolutely should not say yes to this request. It’s rather strange, especially since there are a few individuals who spur confidence in me. When I get a request from them, I have to prove I can do it, I have to do it and do it well, and generally I do. But as soon as it is someone else, the confidence is gone, and so is the client, the money, and/or the moral boost.
ADD/ADHD has a fairly unfortunate negative stigma in our society at the moment. I can kind of understand some of it, especially with kids. Many people rightfully point out that children are over-diagnosed with it, when in reality, they are just high energy children. Fun fact, did you know that a lot of children grow out of ADHD? I didn’t until recently. Adult ADHD affects something like 4% of adults in America today. I have never been formally tested, nor do I take any medication, but I think anyone who knows me and how I am day to day would agree that I have some form of it. I’ve taken a few of those online ‘risk assessment’ tests for it (from various websites, staying on fairly reliable medical sites if possible), and I usually score, well, as high as possible in the ‘risk’ category. One test I took was a scale from 1 ( normal adult) to 15 (potential diagnosis) to 30 (absolutely (but legally can’t exactly say it) you have it). I scored a 29, which was basically followed with a conclusion of “Scores above 25 indicate a likely severe case of adult ADHD.” I have a terrible difficulty paying attention to things. I get distracted very easily. When I was younger, and I mean from like 12 years old til like… 2 years ago, when I would talk to my mom, I would suddenly lose my train of thought, and get distracted by some other thought, or something in the room, or some other form of stimulation, and she would just start saying “SQUIRREL” to get me back to talking to her. Recently I’ve been having a really hard time at work simply finishing conversations without completely losing track of what we are talking about, or forgetting major portions during or after. Combine this with my bad habit of not taking notes or setting reminders, well you can imagine how that is going. The only thing saving me right now is my ability to hyper-focus on tasks to get them done super quickly. I am a professional procrastinator. As long as I remember something before it needs to be finished, I can generally work with that allotment of time to get it done.
That brings me to another thing I am dealing with, that seems to be getting worse recently. My memory. I have an odd memory. I can remember these insane random facts in hilarious detail, but will literally forget a sentence you just told me. I have talked to a boss before, got instructions on moving forward with a project, and between the time I leave his office to sitting at my desk, I have completely forgotten about what he told me. I’ll then spend an unnecessary amount of time trying to focus back on the conversation to remember what I was told, or spend time developing a communication strategy to essentially ask “what the hell did you tell me to do” nonchalantly. I am not sure whether the lack of memory is derived from too much going on at once and too many thoughts in my head preventing my memory from storing that information properly from the beginning, or if my memory itself is failing. I imagine a scene in my head like daycare with a bunch of fire breathing children wreaking havoc in some classroom, and there is one frail hopelessly optimistic teacher there trying to manage it all and keep everyone from killing each other. That is basically what is going on in my head. The insane fire children is all the nonsense I’m dealing with -from the above issues, to the normal day to day adulting chaos we all face- and this small toothpick of a teacher is my memory trying to deal with all that stuff, while also trying to process the information I’m receiving and make decisions on where it goes. The times where I retain the most memories is when I am relaxed and comfortable, and unfortunately, those are usually the times when it is least beneficial to remember the information I am processing.
Alright, I’m sure I am missing a few things but what’s new. I’m not touching on a relatively new aspect, depression, as that seems to be a ‘right now’ thing, and not lifelong issue. The real news story is my self realization that I am probably going or already am insane. Over the past few months, I feel like my perception of reality is changing, and it pops in and out of what it is in my mind to what it actually is. I guess we all kind of live in our own realities, but this seems different. It’s almost like, I see and hear and take in information as it is in our real world, but I feel based on my own reality. I feel like things are better or worse than they are, and I act accordingly, even though my observations tell me that these feelings are not the case. I find myself creating these false memories that I genuinely believe are true, but everyone around me is confirming otherwise. Maybe it ties into the anxiety with the constant worrying and assuming the worst. Maybe it ties into the self confidence thing with the ‘never being good enough’ thing making me create these worlds where I am genuinely the worst thing in the world, or the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe my bad memory is playing tricks on me and I am just not used to this new reality yet. Maybe I am not crazy, I just have not adapted to this new world yet. The world is constantly evolving and you have to change with it to survive. Maybe I am so caught up in these vague moments of glorious happiness that I want to do everything to retain that feeling from that memory, even though that is no longer a thing. All good things come to an end unfortunately, and that is a pill that is really hard to swallow. I miss the days when life wasn’t so hard. I miss the days when I didn’t have to constantly second guess my own memories. I miss the days when I didn’t have to tiptoe around talking to my best friends in fear that I’ll say something that just ends it in a split second. I don’t feel in control anymore. I could do anything, and I still can do anything. I can still help people and love people and hope for a better world. But it is just so hard to do those things when everything is telling you that you can’t, or if you can’t remember if you can, or if you can’t focus on the task at hand for longer than 3 seconds in order to start doing it. Remember, this is all me causing these issues. I don’t really have anyone who is telling me I’m awful, or stupid, or insane. These are all concepts and beliefs that originate from my own head, and unfortunately they are in a lot more control than I was hoping they would be. I really really hate that my struggles in life are based on feelings and emotions. There is so much worse in this world, and there are so many people out there struggling so much more than myself. I have a decent job, I have wonderful friends, I don’t really worry all that much about things, and yet here I am, restless and miserable because of some mental instability. Who would have thought some chemicals and neurons firing in just the right (or more correctly, wrong) way would have such a severe impact on my life? I can understand fearing being eaten by a bear, or starving to death, or falling off a cliff, but seriously, “I don’t feel quite right”? This shouldn't affect me as much as it does. And yet, I’d be the first person to love and support someone who came to me with identical issues. I would assure them that everything is going to be OK, this is normal, they can get through it, all of that jazz. But for myself, eh stop being a bitch.
All in all, I’m probably not crazy, just a bit of a lot of other things, and I don’t know how I am going to deal with that. But I guess that is the fun of life, looking at a challenge and figuring out how to beat it. Anyway, it’s like, 1 am or something, goodnight.
