Back in the day when I did have a therapist, he concluded, with great wonderment, “You are basically a happy person!” 

Considering all the whining I do about my mental health and my physical health, both of which are in bad shape,  you may not believe that. Hell, most of the time I don’t believe that. And yet, there may be some truth in that observation.

Oh here’s a platitude for you – ‘Everyone has their own problems, most worse than yours.’ And that’s true enough for me. 

Anxiety and depression are life long mental health problems for me. The depression comes and goes, sometimes it is very deep and dark and dangerous, sometimes it is not active and obvious. 

Anxiety, on the other hand, is constant. I am a worrier. I am an over-thinker, and over-feeler. I project disasters and spend an inordinate amount of mental energy outlining them and planning for how to deal with them. And when the plans I make to deal with what hasn’t happened yet seem overwhelming, I throw up my mental hands in despair and worry some more. 

I am amused by the solutions people have come up with to deal with anxiety. Lately I have seen proposed that you name your anxiety – ‘Stan’ has come up a lot – and that you talk to your anxiety – “Stan, you need to back off now, I have other things to do” 

I am a person who does indeed name things. I also talk to inanimate objects, and talk back to people on television. My husband found that weird while I explained that I was just ‘interacting with my environment’.  (And that said, I refuse to use Siri or Alexa. When I yell at my computer it is only to excoriate it.) But I just can’t seem to get on a first name basis with my anxiety or depression. Anthropomorphism only goes so far for me.  

Before computers and the internet and social media and friends I have never met, I wrote all this out in a notebook. Then of course there was therapy. Now I have this blog. The thing about dealing with my anxiety in a more public forum is that I feel ‘seen’, the way one feels ‘seen’ when one is in actual therapy. It makes one feel human. 

But, as I outlined in the previous post, dumping your crap on other people is not nice. Therapists get paid to listen, your friends and family do not. So I need to be more cognizant about dumping my emotional problems on the public at large. Whining about toasters can be amusing, whining about personal problems is not. 

So it’s back to private notebooks for my depressing, needy dumps. I don’t want to wear out my welcome with any of you. 

And please don’t comment with any of the lovely things you always say to me – it just makes me cry. You are all dear to me and yes, I love you too!