Hi Ian, I'm Anxiety, Remember Me?

A few weeks ago I had an appointment with my cognitive behavioural therapist.  I had been feeling very good although even then he made me look inside myself in an uncomfortable way - asking me not if my world view that I am a bad person was wrong (which I am used to) but asking me if it was "helpful". Which of course it is not even if I am, and so that was not a conversation I wanted.

Anyway the point of this is that for the first time after maybe a year of visiting him, I have not made a followup appointment because we agreed I was doing well.

And indeed for the first time in many years I had found that whole days will go by without me thinking "I am the worst person in the world" or "I want to kill myself", two internal mantras that have been my constant friends.  I mean the kind of friends where they are people I hang around with all the time even if they are constantly hassling me and making me unhappy.

Things were going well.

Yayy.

Then a few weeks ago my related but different old friend came back. The one called Anxiety, who caused me to have months off work a couple of years ago.

I don't like to ascribe causes but I think this was related to a work project which I was working very hard on and which was not going as well as I had hoped. And I have been worrying a lot about recent political events (which you will not need to to be told about if you are reading this here and now, and if you are reading from the future I don't want to remind you except to say, goodness, well done for reading this, I am glad that the world hasn't ended which is my main worry to be completely honest with you.)

This whole long rambly post is to bring one ray of light into the situation. Despite having much more anxiety than I have had for months, I have been able to do a couple of things. And this has come about despite them being the kind of things that my anxiety doesn't like. And it has partly from the conscious experience of recognising that just because I am anxious about something doesn't mean it will come out badly.

The two things I mean are that I have made some arrangements for the family involving lots of small decisions about what to do, where to stay etc. This is exactly the kind of thing that I find difficult so it is good I was able to do it.  And the second - which sounds almost laughably trivial - is to arrange a car service. That was tricky because I had got fed up with my main dealer so wanted to find somewhere else, then used somebody's web form to book it which didn't work so (wait for it) I had to ring them up and talk to a person.  Yeeeucch.  But again, from experience (and I assume to most people this sounds ridiculously obvious) people who are wanting your money are usually pretty good on the phone so obviously it was indeed no problem and I booked it. But actually making that phone call despite the fact it was anxiety inducing is something I am fairly proud of doing.

You might note that neither of these two things relate to the two things I have been worrying about, but at least I think it's a healthy sign that I could do things which in the past I would not have done when I was feeling anxious.

So it's not all gloom and doom.