Some feelings

As ~tatteredmelon puts it in #853, I'm surviving. Sorry, this comment is gonna be a bit of a trauma dump.

Every day I wake up a little bit before my alarm and am not able to go back to sleep because the anxious thoughts are racing. At work I try to concentrate on my tasks, but half of my energy is spent pushing out the negative thoughts and spending clock cycles with the ones that slip through, so I'm exhausted and still not completing as much as I want/need.

It's been another three weeks since I made my last post on the Fog of War, and the fog seems to have thinned a little bit. I've done my best to convince myself that the worst-case doomsday scenario isn't going to happen any time soon. As if I can predict the future. But hope is the best anybody can have right now, and I just need to live one day at a time.

Hello everyone! I see new faces around the pub. Which is good! ~sonam seems a little awkward to the slow pace of the place ... ~bartender? A hot chocolate with spices, its been one of these days.

So, what happened today? Oh, well. Fighting my way through documentation. Assembly needs to be told in sufficient detail, how to produce the stuff that is actually producing my paycheck. So, of course I have to be nice to them. And I would, but working with MS-Word and a fairly horrible document management system doesn't help. Oh well, there will be better days again.

On the bright side, I received a very long awaited nerdy thing today. However, the learning curve is going to be steep, so I won't touch it today. It might break before it worked --- I'm good at breaking things :-)

~bartender serves a hot chocolate. Ah, thanks so much! Smudge is making an appearance. Since I don't fiddle with the new toy anyway, I don't mind him sitting on my lap and purring away. Good cat. Did Tiddles disappear? You seem more relaxed today. While I sit and stare a bit into the fire and the oncoming darkness outside, I let my mind wander. That part is important for me. I need these times. Therefore I don't mind the commute by train, even though it takes quite a bit longer than by car. I can wholeheartedly recommend some brain time "off" --- meaning no direct interaction with other minds. Let the movies in my head play, and all the whacky ideas make their appearance, they all pass in a little while. Maybe this is what meditation is about, let all them thoughts come and go. The go part is the important thing, I think.

So, when the tide of thoughts ebbs in a little while, I'll take the train home. Cheers!

___Daily___

I usually lock eyes and say "hello" or "hi" to everyone I pass by in the corridor at work, and am always met with a greeting back.

There's this girl who locks eyes with me but never says anything back since I've been worked there. The paranoid part of my brain starts to spin up with thoughts like:

• "Does she not like me?" or
• "Has she heard bad things about me? She doesn't even know me!" or
• "There is sizeable faction of your peers who know of your previous misdeeds and are either giving you the cold shoulder, or are conspiring against you."

___Background___

That last one flits into my mind a lot. During my first job in this field, I was woefully under-qualified and naively over-promised on tasks, resulting in a lot of under-delivering at a pretty public level. I've come a long way since then, to actually become pretty competent, but even so there are enough people out there in my field who probably are not singing my praises.

___Defeating the Paranoia___

There are also people I don't like. Do I try to sabotage their lives, give them the cold treatment, gossip about them behind their back?

That last one: probably yes. After a beer or two in good company, information is exchanged among friends, and even the bestest of friends cannot be reliably tasked with keeping an event secret. So people in the building may know of my previous public failings.

The first few: no, I simply don't care enough and I have other things distracting me in my life to take the time to act against my so-called enemies. So chances are, no one really cares.

___Conclusions___

• Maybe she says "hi" back, but it's too quiet to hear under a mask.
• Maybe she's just shy, or doesn't like interacting with people she doesn't know
• Maybe she knows you, and doesn't like you.

That last one I just have to deal with, and I manage it by being polite and civil with everyone in my building. Kill your enemies with kindness.

I'm pretty new to Midnight Pub, so I've been a little apprehensive about posting! Good to know the slow post count isn't unusual, haha.

Today I've started getting the house back in order after my surgeries, managed to pull out the old bookcase to sweep behind it. I'm also organizing our backlog of laundry to bring down to the laundromat.

Sorry to hear you're going through a rough patch right now. Sometimes, getting over feelings like that just takes time & giving yourself the room to really feel and process them. I hope things start looking up for you soon!