Fun stuff

(in which I joke about emetophobia sort of)

I was setting an alarm and I had a thought

I started keeping my iPod under my pillow/ within reach at night because I was waking up in the middle of the night feeling anxious and I needed a way to calm myself down.

That doesn’t happen to me anymore.

(Sometimes I still wake up in the morning feeling anxious for no reason, but A, it’s morning, and B, it’s still much less often.)

I cooked food today and it was fine.

I ate food today and it was fine.

I washed dishes today and it was fine.

I cooked more food in the aforementioned dishes and it was fine.

I made this sort-of shawarma today and it’s slightly more anxiety-inducing for me than other foods (because it involves cooking with raw meat, and also raw ingredients that go straight into the final dish, and also eating wth my hands) but it’s so good, I keep forgetting how good it is. It smells amazing and now that I’ve bowed to the inevitable and stopped trying to make my own flatbread every time, it doesn’t take very long either.

I cook some onions in the same pan as the chicken and it’s so good. I need to make this more often.

Anxiety stuff

One of the things that really stresses me out is when I feel like I have conflicting, equally important obligations. Not even “conflicting” in the sense that I can only do one of them, but just, I have to decide which one to do first.

Sparkly’s interests in order of how much they freak me out

Airplane crashes: sad but fine
Various wars: sad but usually fine
Serial killers/ violent murders in general: moderately ok
Violent murders with medical-textbook level of detail: no thanks
Infectious deadly diseases: fuck no.

Recursive anxiety again

I’m going to call it that from now on. What I mean is having anxiety about having anxiety– being afraid that you will start feeling anxious, being afraid that people will notice you’re feeling anxious, etc.

It’s still a thing that I don’t have, and it’s apparently a thing that most people with social anxiety do have. I saw a post today about “concealed anxiety” which was on this general theme, and it’s confusing and frustrating. I do like 75% of the things described in that post, but that’s just not why I do them.

Kids stuff

Paradoxically, one of the things that makes me anxious about a lot of “adulting” is having to ask for help with it or admit that I’ve messed something up, because the idea of being seen to be “bad at adulting” bothers me so much.

Tonight I was thinking about how I kind of do have a history of being treated as younger than I am, or being afraid that I’ll be treated that way, in a lot of different contexts.

I spent way too much of my later childhood/teeneageness being embarrassed about things like:

— buying “kids’ meals” at restaurants
(because it was familiar or because I actually didn’t like the other options)

— using kids’ toothpaste
(because I didn’t like mint and kids’ bubblegum was the only other option for a long time)

— wearing clothes that were either actually from the kids’ department not the teen department
(it took me a long time to accept the idea of flare jeans) or were just generally unfashionable (although this was mostly a free choice on my part. I didn’t want to be fashionable because it felt like making a statement that I didn’t understand, and I felt more negatively about the possibility of accidentally being the wrong kind of fashionable than I did about visibly not trying to be fashionable.)

— watching kids’ TV
(I don’t think my tastes were actually particularly behind my age group, but there were a lot of things that were popular with my age group that I didn’t watch. I remember really hating the double-bind of referencing things other people had never heard of, or referencing “younger” things that used to be popular.)

— not drinking soda
(IDK why I thought of that as a juvenile thing, but I did.)

I forget why I was thinking about this

I must have ran across a post somewhere on Tumblr that asked something about “having meltdowns in public”.

Anyway, I thought to myself, Have I ever had a public meltdown? and What counts as public?

Because if public means “in a situation where people (other than maybe your close friends or family) saw it happen,” then the answer is basically never. Not since I was a small small child, of an age where having “tantrums” in public is unremarkable behavior.

But.

Does “in my car in a parking lot” count as public?

Does “in a public bathroom but it was empty and then I composed myself and washed my face” count?

because there have been a few of those, yeah.