The thing about stress

i've been reading a lot of things online about stress and depression and so much of it resonates with me that i think it actually starts to make me feel even more stressed and depressed, and then i talked about all of it, which ends up making it all even worse.

anthony showed me an article called all work and no pay: the great speed up, which just confirmed my horrible paranoia from high school: that we'll never escape animal farm, no matter how hard we try. so much of it hit home for me - especially the comments on multitasking (If you multitask constantly, your actual mental circuitry erodes, and your brain loses its ability to focus") and this super depressing zinger: "Dreading once-pleasant diversions, like dinner with friends, as just one more thing on your to-do list?"

i can't remember the last time i looked forward to something consistently. sure, there's always the initial moment, when i feel excited about something - getting dinner with an old friend, going on an adventure somewhere, even hitting up the movies with my boyfriend. but i begin to feel apprehensive, like i've made the wrong decision, like i could be doing other things with my time. time spent playing video games (even for reviews) should be spent writing articles; time spent writing articles is when i should be packing for my big move; time spent packing should be spent with my cats before i have to give them up (my boyfriend has terrible allergies, we've just learned, and it's my cats that have been giving him asthma attacks the last few months).

let's just focus on that one thing for a moment: i feel like i'm abandoning one of my best friends. i have two cats, and one of them, the pup, has been my best friend for the last decade. sure, that might sound ridiculous, but when i moved into my old apartment after a horrible year, i basically secluded myself in that place and did nothing but watch netflix DVDs and hang out with my cats. the pup became my best friend, and i talked to him and cuddled with him every day. and now i'm abandoning him, and i'm just so completely bummed out about it that some nights i just go home and hug him and cry.

don't worry, i'm not suicidal. i haven't even taken a xanax tonight to curb my anxiety. i'm just at a point of hopelessness that i keep reaching, and i feel like maybe if i write something, anything, it will help.

before someone calls 9-1-1, i'll go onto the next item, which is depression part two at hyperbole and a half. while it was nice to read something so fucking spot on for how i'm feeling, it was also terrifying. she said "However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable."

i realized the other day that i'm some kind of monstrous robot when it comes to small talk - i can just do it. it pours out of me like it's no big deal. i blurt out comments about the weather with alarming speed. in fact, sometimes, at work, i know exactly what a person is going to ask for, so i just answer their question for them - not necessarily because i have a dog-like yearn to please everyone so they'll like me (i could write a book on that), but because i want to get them what they want as quickly as possible so they'll go away and i won't have to turn on my horrible small talk machine.

who am i when i do that? i hear myself asking about children, spouses, cars, houses, friends of friends, pets, things that i don't even know i have filed away, things that most certainly are taking up space i need for something else, and yet it's all in this complicated little filing system that pops open smoothly and hands people everything they want to hear.

of course, i'm not always like this, and it's not that i dislike people - not by a long shot. i wouldn't bother meticulously gathering and filing all that information on people i didn't like. well, that's not true - people i don't like are sequestered in another part of my brain. i guess the people i don't care about at all are the ones i neither like nor dislike - and those people i can barely keep any information straight about at all.

anyway, allison (from hyperbole and a half) says a lot of other things that rang true with me, like "The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself. "

it almost becomes a pissing contest whenever i try to talk to people about how i'm feeling. like, "oh, you're having a bad day? listen to this giant pile of shit my life is!" to which i usually just give up on trying to actually communicate with a human being and let them beat me to death with the giant dick of their one-up-itude.

anyway, i'm not going to quote the entire rest of the blog post she wrote, despite it being spot on about how i feel, so i'll just let you go read it, and just know that I HAVE HAD THAT CORN MOMENT. but right now, i am just in a hate everything in the world phase, and i have no idea why. sure, i'm under massive amounts of stress, from:

full-time job
part-time jobs
school
moving into a new apartment
abandoning my cats
being involved in a million things

and so that might be a big part of it. i am in therapy, and on medication for anxiety and gastroparesis, but some days, i just feel like i need more. i feel like i need to just check the fuck out of life for a few days and sit somewhere in a well-lit room and read some books and no, not go to group therapy or work out my feelings or determine how to deal with things, but to just be myself and alone and not have to feel obligated to talk to anyone or answer a phone or reply to an email.

dear god, to not have to reply to an email.

anyway, in writing this, i've successfully avoided finishing the articles i need to write tonight, so i'm going to get on that. i also didn't eat any dinner, which is probably making me even crankier. but writing all of this did make me feel better, so i guess there's that.