Listening to: Pandora’s Portishead Station
Reading: Manners and Mutiny (work, steampunk article), Harrow the Ninth, Comanche, GhostLand, and How to Be an AntiRacist (Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge)
Reader, I am sitting here wearing my “DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN” shirt, in appropriate fake Latin, of course, thinking about how often I let the bastards grind me down. I’ve talked here before about my mental health, the intrepid brain weasels that taunt me and tease me and make me feel I’m lesser than I am. I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression and OCD all of my life, but didn’t really get psychiatric treatment until 2012. Before that, I used therapy, and self-hatred, and sheer will, to make my brain behave.
Reader, it did NOT behave.
So because I have OCD, I latch on to things, like negative comments, or reviews, or friendships, or behaviors. I worry and worry them until they are embedded in me. I internalize everything. I am trying to learn how to separate out what I am with what others perceive me to be.
This isn’t easy, you understand. A lifetime of worrying what other people thought of me–whether I was too loud, too big, too much, too everything–has shrunk itself into a litany in my head that repeats when I’m in a low moment. It reaffirms all of those negatives I’ve heard before. It tells me I AM too loud, too big, too much, too everything. I’m trying to undo this litany, one step at a time.
My goal for 2021 for this blog is to blog once a week, about something important to my development: my writing, my work, mental health. And I want to see if I can learn from my journaling. I’m not very good at writing without an audience (although I don’t have much of one at the mo), so personal journaling is kind of useless to me now. It had its place in my life, when I was 19, and helpless, but I’m both the same and a different person now. This feels more for me.
Plans for the week: get started on the Spring semester, write and read for work, proofs of an article, expanding creative writing to one hour four times a week, yoga.
The Postmodern Bluestocking 