This is a post where I am going to be expressing some difficult feelings that I’ve been dealing with. The point is to get these thoughts about them out there concretely so I can deal with them better. Get on with my life despite them.
As I start this I’m in the middle of some downtime at work. I used to like that I had a lot of time to think at work but now that works against me. Now it is time that the feelings can use to appear and make life more difficult. I can’t avoid them.
Something happened in my life over a year ago. Something I have mentioned here but don’t want to get specific about in this post. I’m focusing on the effects and dealing with them, and I don’t want to cause any problems with the subject, it’s complicated and involves other people. I trust that it had to happen, I just can’t help the effects.
My life and my environment changed. Necessarily and unavoidably. The loss that involved is deep and I changed. Whatever I was interested in was affected, whatever I usually like to do was affected. What and who I am was affected. And now no matter what I’m doing there’s an ever present feeling of loss, longing, waiting, isolation, insecurity…But I still have to live, so I need to deal with the associated feelings and move forward.
It affects my time at work. Lingering in the background of my thoughts during and between tasks. It started affecting and mixing in with my feelings about my job and job tasks which is something that inspired this post. I started, not dreading precisely but less intensely the admittedly tedious and repetitive nature of my work. It’s not a bad job but I do clean and throw things away for a living.
It affects what I blog about and comment about. I tend to blog about what is happening in my life and what I’ve been thinking about and this has been a big part of that. It’s what I’m dealing with. It took away the passion for other things and I don’t like that. So I’ll use this space to figure it out. I don’t like how my ability to comment or otherwise communicate elsewhere has been affected. The effects have taken some of my voice. Maybe that’s a challenge for me, find something, anything to say about things elsewhere so I’m not as “shut down” maybe.
It affects me when I try to do things I enjoy like play video games. I get this feeling of, wrongness maybe. An anxiety like feeling in my heart. Is it the changed environment? I have been pushing through it with some Halo Legends and Minecraft. I shouldn’t let this affect my ability to enjoy a hobby. These are the things I like to do, I need some of those.
It affects my desire to go out and do things like see a movie or go to the zoo. These are things I should be able to go and do and enjoy on my own. This mixes with my codependency issues I think, so it’s not just what happened. I’ve always done things like this with other people and I’ve gone to see one movie on my own. It felt somewhat isolating when I wasn’t paying attention to the movie.
It’s lurking in the background while I try to think about and plan for my future. These plans of mine to go back to school and try to become a radiology technologist. I was already struggling there though with feelings of, is it worth it? My past failures as a research scientist, then teacher, then health technician. But I’m moving forward bit by bit. Making plans and acting on them. I just want to do it with less unrelated pain. Waiting for something (or some other feeling) related to the community college gets mixed up with feelings of waiting in other areas and if I’m not careful they feed on one another and I start to spiral.
Now that I’m typing about this I can recognize that as a major challenge. Categorically similar feelings in different areas combining to cause extra trouble in living. Is that a named thing in psychology? I bet it is but I don’t know what. Longing here making longing there worse. Insecurity here making insecurity there worse. Grounding myself so that I pull out of a spiral seems to be what helps. Along with some self compassion.
These feelings have also affected my desire to learn to make new friends. Here the effect is a bit different. I want to be able to make new friends more. Like I’m more anxious to be able to do it. I’m still a bit anxious about each individual step though. And I guess I’m a bit more hesitant to contact old friends. It’s confusing and I’m going to do something about it. See how those friends are doing.
I need to get these effects under control. I need to live my life the way I want. Deal with individual things and their associated feelings as they are and not as a mix with other things. Being human is annoying the way similar feelings can mix and make individual things more complicated. But all of this can be controlled and I will control them.
It’s late on a Friday after a long week and an argument with the folks. So maybe I shouldn’t write anything, and there exists a risk that I will write the wrong thing and make things harder. Such is certainly not my intention.
I don’t find Terry Pratchett’s The Truth to be a particularly good novel, but there is a bit which has always stuck with me. Two characters, an editor of a paper and a reporter are arguing:
I believe Sir Pterry touched on a truth there. One that he actually explores more deeply in other novels (but not as explicitly), and one which resonates with human beings (maybe not with a bee or an ant).
We all have agency, which means we also desire to use that agency. That’s how it was put a decade or so ago. Today we might talk about identity. Forty years ago we might have called it power. I like the term agency, but that may be how I learned the concept.
As I get older I believe more and more that human happiness doesn’t rely on wealth, or knowledge, or even the activation of enough dopamine to make you loopy. Human happiness is about feeling in control of your life.
That’s what the above excerpt is about. People who have no ability to influence the tasks they have to perform to make a living; people who may be required to do things to help others, like caring for a relative or pleasing a spouse; people who have to survive under tyranny or anarchy; still want to have control over some small part of their lives in order to feel human. Even if that control is to ensure that a cockatoo isn’t put in the same class as a parrot.
Taking control over small parts of your life will increase the pleasure of living, and make those areas where no control is possible much more bearable. We all have to separate the things we can control from those which we have no control. It can feel, and can be, overwhelming. But keep taking those small steps with things which you can do. Be true to yourself.
I think you are on the right path.
Flex, that was amazing advice. And great to read an excerpt from Terry Pratchett–that man had such a great mind and he was gone far too soon.
Piggybacking on your post to find something to put you out into novel situations that you also feel is in your control–something that’s independent of your job and your living situation. Maybe it’s joining that bowling league? Not only would it put your mind and body on a different track (that is, one that’s not work/school-or-not-school/family) and also put you into social settings with other people that are strongly defined. You show up, you bowl, you chat with your teammates, you go home.