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Positive Affirmations

I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been so anxious and I think I feel like I am not doing anything well enough and I’m just messing up my life because I tell myself that I’m not good enough, that I need to work harder/ be better/ or else… The problem is the anxiety isn’t making doing what I have to do easier, it’s making it more difficult so this is not a helpful way of thinking. If I could find a way to encourage and comfort myself more and to feel more secure in myself I would be able to do better at this part of my life.I have a fear that if I am not so hard on myself, if I let go, if I decide to feel ‘okay’ everything will turn into a disaster and I will be disillusioned.I can understand that I might feel this way given what happened to me in my childhood, but what I must understand is that that wasn’t my fault. I was a child back then. It was my parents job to keep me safe and take care of me, but they didn’t. They weren’t constant, they weren’t reliable and they weren’t “there”. That was not my fault.I am no longer a child. I am an adult and my safety and well-being is my responsibility. I have proven time and time again that I am capable of doing this.That doesn’t mean I am perfect, but it does mean that whatever happens I will be able to take care of it.I am an amazing person with an exceptional life.I courageously followed the love of my life to the ends of the earth. I am the reason we are able to be together.I courageously started a small business after losing my job due to socio-economic problems in the country.I work really really hard and I deserve to take time off.I add value to the organizations I work for and with.I am skilled at finding, developing and mining opportunity.I am a good dog owner.I am a good wife.I am intelligent, loving and fair.

My feelings are valid

My feelings are valid. My struggle is real. When I just read now what I wrote yesterday I am filled with an abundance of compassion for myself.

This is progress. And I just want to say to yesterday that scared me so much “you’re past now and I totally survived you so suck it.”

Also to all the future days that will try to scare me into submission or oblivion “I know now that I’ve survived at least one of you. Don’t think I will forget it.”

Living life on the ledge

My anxiety is through the roof and I find myself thinking… Well, what do I have to be so anxious about? Surely I am overreacting (a little judgy voice in my head points out).

But then, realistically speaking: I actually have A LOT going on. Other people always tell me “they don’t know how I do it.” Other people can see the muchness of what I deal with on a daily basis, but I can’t, because I’ve been taught by my internal parent to ignore my own emotions and limitations, which on the one hand has given me a CV that others would kill for and on the other hand has also almost gotten me killed.

If I try to think objectively about it I can actually see that it’s emerging as a strong theme in my life: this endless circus and balancing act of my life. I thrive on living on the edge, pushing myself to the limit, juggling the tasks of life like big colourful balls in the air whilst jumping through the hoops of other people’s expectations in a house that is on fire because I cope best in chaos. I am recreating, over and over again, as if by some invisible forceful hand of destiny, my own childhood nightmare; over and over and over again.

I’m not unhappy, just very very very anxious, to the point of breaking, all the time or that is what I tell myself. I still have difficulty defining and identifying all my emotions. I’m working on that.

On the outside it looks like I have it all: the management job at a reputable firm with a fair salary. 1 day a week off to run my own business. My own accounting firm. And now also perhaps a contract to teach and run an online course for an online university (teaching is one of my biggest passions). I am grateful for all of these opportunities and I work on all of them.

But why am I so anxious?

I guess I’m just a bit overwhelmed. Is that normal? Perhaps, I don’t really do normal well. Perhaps I’m afraid of failing. Perhaps I can feel the fuel in my tank running low, with no gas station in sight, and I am paralyzed with the fear of ending up with an empty tank and no results. After all, this isn’t all just a show, we need results. Real results that matter. Like financial security. “The accountant that couldn’t figure out financial security… ” an apt name for a children’s book about life lessons and how to not approach it.

I’m rambling, I know, but this is my therapeutic journal… I’m allowed to. After all, it’s not easy living life on the ledge.

People call me overly dramatic, oversensitive, over emotional, too much all the time and I am aware that I am being that right now. It’s one of the borderline traits. Instead of feeling sad I feel the kind of the despair that would be justified by the world ending, instead of feeling joy I feel the kind of elation one would feel (hopefully) on the day you marry the love of your life. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself well at all, but that is how it feels. There is no buffer. No skin. Just raw emotions doing combat with raw reality. And apparently it will always be there. Right now my goal is just to calm down enough for me to get some much needed sleep before my next 14 hour shift at my 3 different jobs.

Today was a good day

Today I need to pause to recognize the fact that today was a good day. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t all butterflies and sunshine. In fact it was a rainy day. I worked 10 hours, well excluding smoke breaks of which I took 2… I got up at 05:30 and got home at 18:00. My business probably won’t make a profit this month. My water and electric bill still isn’t paid. I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m not on holiday and I haven’t made my first million, but still… It was a good day.

I found joy in doing a good job on one of the tasks on my technical list for the day (the kind I’m usually good at). I found relief in finally finishing off one of the jobs that I spent way too many hours on doing (in accounting that means I didn’t do a good job). I found comfort in knowing that my husband loves me so much that he spent the last part of last night talking to me when he got home from the pub. It felt like we related. He even made me breakfast and left it in the microwave for this morning (he doesn’t get up as early as me). I found hope in the fact that my business partner took some initiative in making a difficult call to a client (one that I told him I am not making).

I wasn’t too anxious during the day today. I used 15 minutes of lunch to go to gym. The work colleague that went with me (lets call her Iron Woman shall we) comforted me by saying that “Sometimes you don’t have to do everything 100%, you just have to do everything 1% better and you’ll be fine”. She says I’m in a lucky position to be worrying about ” do I quit my job and focus on my business or do I quit my business and focus on my job or do I just keep juggling and praying that things stay in the air.” I also, by some miracle, decided to organize some of my clothes, providing me with easier access to warmer clothing now that the weather is turning into winter.

Somehow my circumstances today was still the same, but also completely different. I guess perspective really does make a difference. And perhaps having boundaries in place that caused me to not work the WHOLE weekend is a good thing. Also, it probably doesn’t hurt that I took the initiative to get my doctor to put me back onto 100mg sertraline a day.

Overall I feel happy, like today was a good day.

All roads lead back to hell – reflection on the week past

This was a really intense week. In fact, it was borderline bad – pun intended. I had a ton of deadlines to get through at my day job and I still have a ton of things to get to for my side hustle. My anxiety has been through the roof and I have been resorting to sleeping pills for sleep. On top of this I have this ‘doomed’ perspective on all of this just thinking that all of this stress and work is ‘for nothing’ and that ‘all roads lead back to hell.’

One thing I did realise this week though is that I do tend to engage in ‘disastor thinking’ – or whatever it is called, where I just automatically assume everything will turn out for the worst. I do also realise, perhaps for the first time in my life, that this really is a ‘thinking trap’ and not very helpful towards life in general at all. I tend to label this thinking in my head as ‘cautious’ and ‘conservative’, sometimes even ‘realistic’ or ‘prepared for the worst’, but really all I am accomplishing by thinking this way is convincing myself that the worst of the worst is coming. This is a method that my parents used to use on me to make me ‘try harder’, but what it has been doing lately, when I literally can’t ‘try harder’ because I’m completely burnt out, is making me give up and become anxious. I feel like the whole world is out of control and nothing is at it should be and I am somehow to blame for all of this.

I am ready to let go of this thought trap now. I just pray to God that it lets me go too.

On a slightly more positive note I did manage to accomplish some things this week: I mended the relationship with my business partners and I think they now understand where my concerns for the business was coming from. I feel more at ease that they understand what is at stake and that they share the responsibility to make things work with me.

My husband all of a sudden feels like he has the ‘best job ever’, which means he has been learning more about his role in the business. It’s just really nice to see him ‘care’ about the business for a change as for the first two years of this he would just ‘watch’ me trying to make it work, saying that he believes in me, but not really engaging with the business and the work behind it, at all. I’m glad he cares and is developing into his role in the business.

I managed to express to the boss at my day job the amount of pressure I am under with performing at his job, and how I feel I am failing at this. He reassured me once again, that I do add value to the business and it is okay to keep learning… So for now….perhaps that is okay. I mean, you never know with ‘bosses’. My experience with authority figures have been that they are extremely unpredictable, but then again…I do have complex post traumatic stress disorder so perhaps that is also a thought patter I should investigate…eventually.

I managed to point out to this boss person how much pressure he was putting on my colleaugue as well. She started crying in front of him, but I kind of feel chuffed that I made him see how she was feeling. Perhaps he will be more gentle with her from now on. I don’t know. That was kind of like a ‘good deed’ for the day so I think it is worth mentioning.

I also have a very supportive manager at my day job which has also kind of pointed out how hard I am on myself. She hasn’t started ‘hating’ me yet. I guess this is another fear of mine I should explore of some point. She is so nice and amazing. I really want her to like me, same with the boss, so now I have this fear that I will do something or I will underperform and they will ‘hate me’. It sounds stupid, but when you’ve been raised on conditional love that fear can feel all consuming – even now still as an adult in my late twenties.

I think I’ve acted particulourly grown up with my husband lately. I am trying to do what the “Boundaries” book of Dr. Henry Cloud & John Townsend says and take responsibility for my wants and needs and everything else that is mine. Letting go of trying to control other people… So when my husband told me this weekend that he did not particulourly feel like going for a hike this weekend I told him it is ‘not a problem at all.’ and I actually meant it. It is my want to do something this weekend that will take my mind completely off of what is going on in my life and allow me to relax and I met it with playing some free game on my phone today (I know not the best substitute, but hey…I am trying to selfcare here…perhaps next time I will muster up the confidence for yoga or something or going on the hike by myself or with other people).

I also managed to get to the doctor and convince him that he should up my Sertraline subscription to 100mg instead of 50mg. Long story short, about three months ago I had no anxiety and felt really good with the way I was dealing with life so I decided to stop taking my anti-depressant (Sertraline) which I used at 200mg everyday for two years before that… Now I am anxious again and the nightmares have actually come back (as you’ll see from my posts I’ve been struggling emotionally) so I convinced the doctor help me get back onto the Sertraline. The reason I have to convince him, by the way, is because I had a fancy doctor way back when I started the anti-depressants, because I had a fancy job. I have since quit said fancy job, and now I am a struggling entrepreneur so I am going to the most affordable doctor I could find…which means convincing him first of all that I need the Sertraline and second of all that I need to get back to the very high dosage, or at least as close to it as possible, as soon as possible.

So I am atleast on 100mg Serdep now again…and I got some sleeping pills for in case sleeping is a problem. I also got some anxiety medication…which is addictive so I am trying to not take too much of that. Hopefully the Serdep will start working its magic again soon though…I am looking forward to feeling more emotionally balanced, safe and under control.

I also managed to read and understand a bit more of the “Boundaries” book written by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend. Here are some pictures of what I understand so far (this is all Greek to me as I come from a very disfunctional family, but once I’ve figured it out a bit more, I might do a post on it just to capture the essence of it):

Original Image by Alexandra Haynak from Pixabay 
Original Image by Deflyne Coppens from Pixabay

So ya, I guess I survived a lot this week and I actually got some good out of it so no need to feel so depressed about it…