I am glad this week is Thanksgiving. I am surprised at how quickly time has gone by but here we are. It’s not so much the holiday itself or the food. I’ve had too many rich meals already. We had our in-house company Thanksgiving today and I ate as little as possible. Darcy and I had a Mexican feast on Saturday, followed by him eating half of a cherry cheesecake I made on Sunday night. I felt like a blimp this morning. (Or, as my friend Miles put it, like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Float.) I haven’t even had the official Thanksgiving Day meal yet and I am already like, “Oh God. I want to go on a diet immediately. F*ck me.” Part of the problem was that I was busy as hell all weekend and didn’t eat until I was ravenous. That is typically not the best way to make wise decisions. Tonight I’ll either hit the treadmill for an extended period of time or do some high powered cardio. Not saying I want to, but I need to.
I read this article today and thought it was amazing. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prescriptions-life/201008/why-it-s-hard-be-highly-sensitive-hsp-introvert). As I’ve been working with my anxiety lady, one of the unexpected fringe benefits for me has been getting to know myself better. Also, it’s been invaluable to finally be able to put some verbiage to traits I have and things I’m feeling. I’ll give you some for instances. I’m not a big fan of overhead lights; the brighter they are, the more I hate them. I like ambient light and soft watt lamps. I don’t like eating, working, sleeping, etc., on a damn Broadway stage. I don’t like a lot of noises and crap going on at night when I’m trying to sleep. Unexpected loud noises generally make me think some sort of violence is happening. I don’t mind thunderstorms and listening to the rain—but again, those noises are expected parts of nature. I don’t like it if I’m in a crowd of people and there’s a bunch of pushing, shoving, intimidation, etc. Get the fuck out of my face and keep your hands off of me. I’m a Quagmire for sure. I love to be touched and it doesn’t bother me to be hugged or petted. But that has to be from someone I want to be touched by. Not like random-ass weirdos out on the street. There are times when certain members of my family or colleagues have tried to hug me and I’ve thought, “Oh, let’s don’t.” If I like you, we’re friends and there’s nothing sexual about it, it’s OK. However, if I don’t like you or I think you perceive a hug as an opportunity to grope, keep your paws to yourself. Like the time when the ancient man at the grocery store leaned down and sniffed my hair. That was just plain creepy. I don’t like people getting in my face. This lady who is the wife of one of Darcy’s, shall we say, less than mature and rather trashy friends, got in my face on Thursday evening at a corporate dinner and I really wanted to smack her. I didn’t. She asked me where we had been (as if it was any of her business) and I said, “We’ve been doing what married people don’t.” Then I proceeded to drink too much to cope with my irritation and anxiety. Lesson learned on that. Drinking to calm down the Anxiety Demon will: a) only turn you into a drunk, loud, combative asshole and b) make the panic attack 10x worse when it does hit. Not fun. I spent about four hours on Friday morning twisting my guts in a knot and being entirely too upset about bullshit. Some of it was work related, some of it was the bad Thanksgiving dinner and the shithead woman. Oy.
The word my counselor kept coming back to was “overwhelmed.” Yes. That is well said. I don’t like situations where I feel overwhelmed, be it physical or emotional. We also talked about how I tend to break scenarios down into respectful versus disrespectful and that’s true, too. The times when Darcy and I have gotten into disagreements have typically stemmed from him doing something I perceived as insensitive or disrespectful. It's a relief in many ways to understand that I feel things more deeply and for a longer amount of time than the general population but that doesn't mean I am defective or that everyone else is a non-empathetic sociopath. Darcy is fairly walled off emotionally but I've seen him cry twice and he's able to apologize when he fucks up. This tells me that he is not a sociopath or a robot. But it's not likely that he is as sensitive as I am-- but that's OK!
