...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.