Half-Measures
Sir has been… seemingly forever… trying to teach me the value of half-measures. I’m not good at them.
The way Sir thinks things should work: Too tired to unload the whole dishwasher? Unload half the dishwasher and then have only half to do tomorrow…
The way I think things should work: Too tired to unload the whole dishwasher? Leave the entire thing loaded so I can be too tired to unload a whole dishwasher again tomorrow…
We cleaned the refrigerator last week. It was authentically stressful to me to, first of all, even think about cleaning the refrigerator (there was a leak so water had pooled on all the shelves, in the drawers, and in the bottom of the fridge. Uck!
Sir made us start with the crisper drawers and the bottom of the refrigerator. It took an hour. Then we stopped for the night.
I found it incredibly upsetting to… tackle the job at all. And then to… not finish it (despite the fact that it would have taken two more hours and I was exhausted and overwhelmed and probably would have ended up crying in a corner if I tried to do all of it anyway. But it was SO HARD because… in my mind… it is a single job. Clean the refrigerator. Breaking it into multiple smaller jobs can’t… happen. So it is one huge terrible job that I’d rather avoid completely than start and fail at (AKA not finish).
I’m not sure what this neurosis is, but it is very paralyzing. I think it’s some relative of my neurotic perfectionism… I become paralyzed by the fear I won’t do something perfectly and run away from it completely rather than do it imperfectly. It is the constant, pervading anxiety that I’m not doing things… right.
And it’s worth running away because when I DO do things… like… interact with other humans, or… clean something… I become seized with terrible anxiety about having done it imperfectly… I’ve obsessed (and avoided) on a conversation I had with my principal this afternoon. Which went fine. I’m sure it went fine. But the knot in my stomach that won’t go away desperately needs for me to hyper analyze every nuance of ever moment of the entire conversation for all of the things I did wrong. And of course, the meditation I ran earlier… and the conversation I had with a co-worker before that… and the lesson I taught yesterday… and…
I really wish my brain would… just… give me a break every once in a while.
It’s exhausting living inside of me.
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