Sunday, expanded

Birthday month may be over but other people are still continuing to get older, and yesterday was my boyfriend's birthday. For various reasons I made most of his presents. I made him cushions (three. I got carried away), one of which had a picture of his face on it.

Him: [staring at cushion and laughing his head off] That's terrifying.
Me: I know.
Him: I love it. It's terrifying.
Me: I know it is. It's been sitting in my room just looking at me for several days.
Him: I sort of feel like I should leave it here.
Me: No way. You having a cushion with your face on it is funny. Me having a cushion with your face on it would just be creepy.

I also made him a cake shaped like a fruit market, because I miss when I used to make people cakes shaped like ridiculous things all the time. Presenting people with tanks and race tracks and beans on toast and pianos and snakes and Christopher Walken sat navs was fun; the recipient usually knew I made stupid cakes and was probably even expecting one, but they still wouldn't know quite what to say when they saw it.

We went for dinner. It was by far the most expensive dinner I've ever had in my life. If it had been half the cost it still would have been the most expensive dinner I'd ever had in my life by some way. I've never done fancy food and I don't really understand it, but it was what he wanted to do for his birthday, so off we went. I dressed head-to-toe 1920s and felt very pleased with myself. We had eight courses (plus a cheese board), all of which were very tasty. At least six of them I wouldn't have gone near a year or two ago. I feel like I'm growing. It was amazing food, and I do understand why it's a thing now, but I still can't get my head round choosing to spend that much money on one meal. But that's OK, it's his thing. It doesn't have to be mine.

(Also we had matched wine with the whole thing, plus some champagne, and I have not been my brightest and sparkliest today.)

Tomorrow I go to my new office. I am nervous, and not the good kind of nervous.

Sunday

(It's still Sunday. I just got home.)

Tonight I have had an eight course dinner, plus a cheese board. I have had seven glasses of wine, plus a champagne aperitif. I am too drunk to write. This is OK.

no time

Today I have made things. Birthday presents and birthday cake. I created birthdayness with my hands.

I went on an emergency shopping trip to John Lewis to buy some extra duck down cushion pads, which is possibly the most middle-class thing I've ever said in my life. Oxford Street on a Saturday lunchtime is a particular joy I could have done without. I don't find it quite as horrendous as most people say they do, but it nevertheless makes me into a horrible person inside my own head, hating everyone who stops or slows down or has a big bag or appears to be frightened of escalators.

Now I have to go out, to create birthdayness with my presence. And then tomorrow, I will create birthdayness by giving my boyfriend a handmade cushion with a picture of his face on it. Why not?

leaving

I left my office today, possibly forever.

Over the past four or so years, I've got very comfortable there, stupid high-rise rabbit warren that it is. It's familiar. Ingrained deeply enough into my brain that I can get to it, get around it and get away from it without ever having woken up properly. I can spend days, weeks, months on autopilot there, which I know isn't good for me but I've been struggling to persuade myself to give up that level of ease in exchange for uncertainty and scariness.

But the office is falling down (I might have mentioned), so we're being relocated for the short term until they find somewhere to put us for the medium term until they decide what to do in the long term. We've been advised that it'll take six months to stop the office falling down, and if everyone goes back, I'd like not to go with them.

The comfort is being taken from me. It'll be harder to get to work, the short term office will be much, much less pleasant (and "pleasant" would never have been a word I'd use to describe our building), and I won't really have my own space anymore. And since I'm going to be uncomfortable anyway, this might be the time to force myself to move on.

sick

I don't feel well. I don't know if it's the kind of not well that comes from stress, or from unkind office lighting, or from having a bug of some description, but everything in my head feels uneasy and strained, and my concentration is shot. I space out or feel woozy or get a wave of nausea and then it goes away, but every time I worry that's it, that's the one that means I'm really truly sick and won't be able to do any of the things I'm meant to be doing this weekend.

The roof of my mouth aches. I don't know what this means. I wish I understood my own body more, what causes an ache here or a pain there and the sort of things that can be done about. It's on my list of things to learn, but it's the kind of knowledge that scares me - as soon as I learn a little bit I'll start to see how much I don't know about myself, how much can go wrong, how many things I've been doing to hurt myself without knowing it. I know that if I choose to get deeper into it, I'll find answers to things I didn't even know there were questions for and things would make a lot more sense, but the fear is there nevertheless.

I doubt myself when I'm sick. I question whether I'm really sick, or whether my brain is just trying to convince me I'm sick because it doesn't want to do something. Being sick is something my depressed brain does when it's pretending to be my rational brain - I can't go out because I'm depressed, but it tells me I can't go out because I'm sick. Feel that twinge when you stepped. You're going to faint, you're going to be sick, you'd better get back in bed before something awful happens. I'm not particularly depressed at the moment, but my anxiety brain is alive and well and trying to make me afraid of the depression monster.

You need to do EVERYTHING. ALL the things. Right now.

Maybe I don't. Maybe I just need to let myself be sick.

people-watching: men on a journey edition

I am stressed, and it's making it hard to write, but I promised. So here are some men I happened to see today.

A young man walking up a busy street looking lost, clutching a large handful of fresh mint.

A man in full Woody from Toy Story costume, Woody expression fixed on his face, wandering around the make-up department of John Lewis.

An old man with crazy curly hair, wearing an enormous hunting overcoat and a rhinestone-covered women's watch, standing on the tube apologising to everyone in a tone that was either profuse and well-mannered or straight-up bald-faced sarcasm, and I spent the entire journey trying to work out which.

A man with a baby strapped to his chest, attempting awkwardly to teach her about basic anatomy. He was thrilled when she seemed to understand him, but at the same time clearly perplexed about why such a thing should make him so happy.

A man sitting on the tube as it came into its final destination and continuing to sit as everyone else left. He was asked to move, and did so slowly and with a sigh, like he'd been expecting this but was nevertheless disappointed that it had happened.

(Also, I am one minute late posting this. I wrote it on Wednesday and haven't gone to bed, which makes it still Wednesday by all sensible laws.)

...but the plan

[Note: post is about current emotional state. Post may read as whiny and/or daft]

For some reason, I have recently lost the ability to deal with things not going the way I thought they were going to go. And I don't mean in the sense of being disappointed that something wasn't as good as I thought; if there's a plan I don't care about one way or another, and something that isn't that plan happens instead, I get disproportionately stressed out and sometimes burst into tears. 

I went to therapy today. My therapist wrote an agenda for the session on the whiteboard, as he always does, and we started talking. About fifteen minutes before the end of the session I realised that we were still on item two of four and there was no way we were going to get to the other two things today. This is an entirely normal thing to happen, but it stressed the hell out of me. I stopped listening to anything he was saying because I couldn't get past how he wasn't sticking to the plan, dammit. Then I started trying to justify my reactions in my head.

He did this last week as well. With those same two things! One of which I asked to talk about! We are never going to get to those things. Why is he still talking about this thing? We should be done with this thing. Nobody cares about this thing! Why did he spend over half the session on the homework and telling me about the lizard brain again? Why does he even write these agendas if he's not going to stick to them? 

This carried on until I got frustrated enough to burst into tears, which of course he asked about, and professional therapist though he might be, I could see that he had absolutely no idea what my problem was. He's usually great at listening to me, but he couldn't understand that I wasn't upset about us not dealing with those specific subjects so much as I was upset about the fact that he said we would. He said. 

This afternoon I took a meeting at work. The chair is crap at chairing meetings, so I never expect them to run to the time we set out in advance. But this time, just before discussion of the final item started, someone asked him how long it would take so that he could plan his journey home. "Oh, about fifteen, twenty minutes," said the chair. "We're definitely not going to need the whole half hour." OK, I thought, good. That's a plan now. He obviously knows what needs to be said. In practice, this last point took an hour and a half. Even though he said. Most of it wasn't relevant so I didn't have anything to do except sit there and freak out. I drank an entire decanter of water trying not to cry. 

It's ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous. Being pissed off that he wasted an hour and a half of my life is normal. Freaking out about how that wasn't the plan and why was nobody else bothered about the plan is rather less normal. But I'm doing it all the time. I do it when a friend tells me they'll do something and then don't do it. I do it when my boyfriend and I agree a plan and then don't immediately start doing the planned thing. I do it when the train says it's ready to depart and then fails to depart. 

I don't really know what to do about it either. There doesn't seem to be any advice on how to stop this because people don't generally think it's a thing. But it is a thing, and it's in my head and I can't get it out. Gah.