Sharing your anxiousness has a goal: forcing others to take note and show their caring.
The loss of control that causes anxiety is relieved by reaffirming your status with others: your pain controls others; thus, you have some agency in the world.
Tag: emotions
- Theme: Self
Eat your pain
°
1–2 minutesYou can be a little self-pitying booger all morning, angry and weepy and manic, and finally, realize you don’t need that behavior.
It isn’t beneath you; it is just that you know how this plays out, and it is exhausting and hurtful.
Eat that pain, choke that rumination, and know you are God-damn amazing. How did you ever forget that truth? Eat that darkness and burn bright. - Theme: Self
You become your feelings
°
1–2 minutesYour feeling becomes your emotions, which drive your thinking, which in turn becomes your performance in the world.
You are your actions, and if you don’t want to be who you are, start debating the feelings that drive you. - Theme: Self
Feeling the good life
°
1–2 minutesThere is a difference between knowing life could be better and feeling you have lived better.
Recalling a moment of joy, peace, and contentment so profound it haunts you can vibrantly displace the folly of knowing and redirect our striving. - Theme: Growth
there is always clean up after a party
°
1–2 minutesThe price of excessive fun includes setup and execution, which is part of the fun.
However, the actual cost is the sober responsibility of reordering not only the physical but also the emotional and relational detritus strewn across the metaphorical yard. - Theme: Self
self-made traps
°
1–2 minutesEvery problem I have is a self-made trap.
When I work too much, I do not set the boundary: I dangerously conflate my ‘sense of self’ with accomplishment and people-pleasing. All my responsibilities are my earlier wishes coming true.
Unfortunately, my previous dreams overwhelm me, turning into nightmares. I act out, angrily throwing tantrums until I am recognized and soothed like a child. - Theme: Growth
Locomotive Ambition
°
1–2 minutesMotion, that is, movement or locomotion, is necessary to perceive our environment. Thinking evolved from mapping out space: finding what the environment affords and pursuing goals based on your previous location.
The reversal is when we think we move: if anxious or neurotic, we compulsively fidget.We are (mostly) not coerced to move for survival. Instead, we have internalized the threat of expulsion and channeled it into ambitious energy, productivity, and discontent… often marked by a compulsive twitchiness.
- Theme: Self
Real Cool v Fake Cool
°
1–2 minutesReal cool lacks striving and is comfortable.
Fake cool adopts the affectation of not caring while caring immensely, which requires repressing anxiety and authenticity for social acceptance. Artifice may avoid isolation by isolating the ‘self,’ but the double-bind invariably leads to a schizophrenic crash, which is not cool. - Theme: Self
The Human Barometer
°
1–2 minutesMy body is so sensitive to weather pressure it affects my mood: downward pressure depresses my mood, causing anger and headaches.
We are environmental creatures, often reacting to cues so subtle we are unaware and only able to understand that odd personality with sympathetic hindsight. - Theme: Self
everything is emotional, everything is personal
°
1–2 minutesWe live in a society, not alone in space. We think of and desire the other; even when alone, we shape ourselves for others.
Every decision involves how we see ourselves through others, and every joy or disappointment comes from the success or failure to align to the other. And so, the striving is always emotional (from our desires), and the alignment is subjectively judged, letting every misalignment create fear and hurt.
Knowing that we are fueled by emotion, craving an oddly shaped personal outcome, we can work backward from the hurt to find the fear that stemmed from a failed alignment of how we fit into the world.