New year reflection
So it's 2012. I think I've been taking my career too seriously due to anxiety. That plus bad economic news makes me think I'm hanging by a thread and just one bad decision away from homelessness. This causes me to freak out over every day hardships, random bills that come in higher than expected. More money, more problems; no money, more problems still. To paraphrase The Shins - a patient me would never give it more than a frowning hour, but loss has conquered me. Loss of job in 2008 that I never got over, loss of normality in relationship. Never felt like I belonged or that anything was stable. Hence thoughts of suicide.
However thanks to help from people here I realized it wasn't ending life that I wanted; I probably wanted life more intensely than ever in my depression. It's just that the change I desired seems out of reach and I have struggled to overcome learned helplessness ever since I realized there could be an alternative way.
Then there is the opposite current, the cheerful me, the creative one. The me that comes out when I am not alone, but still allowed to be myself without concern about status or networking or strategizing for the future. The me that I am performing on stage, or that I am when spoiling my niece. So it would seem the solution is to find more opportunities to be the positive one and avoid the situations where I will feel like a victim of a Kafkaesque dystopia.
It is there that I am stuck. Opportunities to be creative cost money, which means I have to play the game of being the corporate climber in order to have the occasional opportunity to travel and see my loved ones or to work on my musicianship to get back to the point where I could join up with a new band. Then again, the demands of full time careerism consume energy that is needed for more satisfying pursuits. Next step then is to figure that out.
For the past year my brain and heart have been going through the grief process of accepting that I have a mental illness. If I look back I was going through the denial, bargaining, guilt/fear, and anger over the fact that I'm not like normal people. I'm still not sure if it's depression or something else. I have all the symptoms of depression and that's my most common diagnosis, but at the same time I've been diagnosed with anxiety multiple times and done years of work to get through my PTSD problems. Last week my therapist said she thinks I have significant ADHD issues as well, although she only works with childhood ADHD not adults. This is a lot to come to terms with.
I have always had concerns about ADHD because of my problems planning, managing time, etc, and even this is why I joined this site in the first place, but I had just gotten used to the idea that it was all anxiety/depression when one Xanax got me to a normal feeling after a panic attack, and this was the first time since college I didn't feel my emotions were out of whack with reality.
For the moment though, it seems like acceptance is the only way I'm going to move forward. I can't change it, and no matter how hard I try to control all the moving pieces in my world, I can't do much if I'm wasting energy complaining about the way things are. Noticing a problem and troubleshooting it is one thing, but fighting the nature of reality is taking an admirable tendency too far. Taking things too far seems to be my preferred M.O. At least that has been stable in my life. So the trick now is either to learn how to set and respect my own limits, or find a way to use my tenacious tendencies as a strength.
I have no clue if this will stick. I'll probably change my mind about all this in a couple weeks. I wonder if that is normal, which has been my question for the past few weeks... is this normal.
Whether it's problems scheduling/procrastination (is this something everyone deals with or do I really have a problem here) or wondering what ever I will do if I get laid off at 50 like some people have - is it even possible to mitigate that risk - I feel lost without a standard of what is normal, what is excellent, and what is a problem.
In conclusion my current direction is to practice acceptance that I'm just different from my normal thinking peers and figure out if I can use that to my advantage. If I'm lucky, my career will take care of itself as long as I am comfortable with who I am and I know what I want to do. Neither of these conditions do I meet yet, so I guess my work is cut out for me.
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