09.02.2022 | “Wound Up, Found Out…”

Lyrics: “Haven’t Been Doing So Well” ~ Frank Turner, 2021

Cats | Still an ongoing saga, in which I’m assigned an even more active role. But I’m still fine with it. Some excitement in my boring every day life at least. This afternoon finally one of the ‘missing’ cats made their way into the trap. Only one of the cat welfare ladies was around, so I had to help out at some point, holding down one of the contraptions so the cat could be transferred to a transport box.

Work | Still busy. Still feeling like we’re getting somewhere or at least get everyone on the immediate team on the same page. On the other hand… it sometimes still is a big well of worry / anxiety for me.

Worry | I hesitate to call it anxiety (attack), because this feels like such a medical term which should come with a proper diagnosis. And attack feels like such a big word for these moments when I doubt myself and blame myself and feel it in my bones. Well not bones as much as increased heart rate and in the pit of my stomach. You know: when you feel bad about something. And I mostly snapped out of it after a while, when I let myself think about the moment rationally.

What was the occasion? A response I got from one of the department heads to a request I sent to them all to look over a few pages and give some input. I know that’s all very vague, but specifics aren’t relevant here. The response was something like: “We already gave you some input last year, why are you asking us again, we don’t have time in the span of time you asked us to and we don’t really understand what you’re asking for anyway. Please explain yourself!” At least that’s how I parsed it. And how it probably wasn’t even meant. But that’s the whole fucking problem with my mind. I immediately started blaming myself for not involving them sooner, for giving them such an unclear assignment, for being so behind our original timeline with the whole project and so on. And of course the physical response set in right away.

I forwarded the mail to my supervisor and asked him to read over my original message and tell me if it really was that unclear and if I was really asking for too much. Spoiler Alert! He said, no my email was fine and not too much to ask and he didn’t really get why this person replied in this way. He wasn’t bothered at all by this possibly defensive stance from another department. Just asked me to call them tomorrow and explain once again what we’re asking of them. Wish me luck with this one. The thing is: The rational part of my mind know that yes, we’re behind schedule and yes, we probably should have given them more of an update in the meantime, but my request really wasn’t too much to ask. But the emotional part still struggles with believing it.

Frank really sums it up so well

Don’t you ever wake up and suspect
That you were simply never cut out to be
The kind of person they expect,
The person you intended to be.

Journaling a bit about it helped. And also ‘analysing’ the whole moment through a technique I got from the German MindDoc app I started using over a year ago. It’s basically a way to take apart the whole chain of subconscious reactions and look at each bit more closely.

What was the trigger? What did I immediately think/feel about it? How did that manifest? Check why my thoughts and feelings might have be wrong (and they so often are)? Learn from it.

The learning part is still some way off, but at least by now I’m doing alright by reevaluation my initial response. It’s a work in progress, right? But it’s exhausting, I mean literally. Too exhausted to look for a pic to share today…

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