About a month ago I posted this list of all the things I'd done in the first two and a half months of the year. It's a lot of stuff. The last point is actually about 20 different things - posh dinners, cocktail nights, comedy gigs, operas, cinema trips, nights in the pub, blues dance socials, and a mystery birthday surprise where they locked a bunch of us in a room and we had to logic our way out again. It's almost all been great fun, but for someone battling anxiety and Joyous Recurring Fainting Disease, it's a LOT of stuff. Too much stuff?
...yes.
When I first noticed I was struggling and started thinking about how to fix it, I did the logical thing: thought back to last time I had a mental health problem. How did I fix it then? I went to therapy, I took up blues, I started going out socially. It revolutionised my life, and I was like a different person. Which is the point. When I started getting therapy back then, my entire social life consisted of going to a dance class once a week. I never saw any of those people outside of class, and I would have something to do at the weekend maybe once every two months. My mother would call me and ask, hopefully, what I'd been up to, and I'd feel like it was a victory if I could tell her we'd walked to the supermarket rather than getting our shopping delivered. Of course it was revolutionary when I started dancing blues and getting invited to socials; I'd basically done nothing and met no new people for years.
I'm not that person anymore. My last free weekend was in January and I don't have another one until June. Between now and my next free weekend I'm going to several dinners, birthday parties and dance socials, as well as my usual classes, an opera, a treasure hunt, a hen night, a visit home and a holiday to Morocco. I booked a few days off work to give myself a break, then realised I was still going to be busy on four out of five of those days. Going away already clashes with four other things I'd quite like to do. If I commit myself to a regular course or class on a weeknight, I immediately find something else I really want to do on that night.
Replacing the anxiety with New Things seemed like a good plan. It worked before. My head was so full of dance that I had no space to worry. But two free weekends in six months? Scheduling myself three, four, five nights a week? I'm exhausted. I'd set myself up a plan of acrobatics Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues or solo dance or balboa Wednesday, kickboxing Thursday. When the acrobatics course ended would switch to kickboxing Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues/solo/balboa Wednesday, balboa or ballet Thursday. That is a fucking insane plan. Heavy exercise four nights a week every week when I'm in somewhat crappy health to begin with? Of course, what then happens is that I'm too exhausted to go to one or more of my planned activities, and I lie in bed instead feeling crappy and unproductive and like I'm not doing enough. Which is exactly what I may or may not be doing right now.
It's difficult to cut things out, or cut things back. People remember aloud how things used to be, they make "hmmm" noises, they talk about how much fun all the things I'm doing are, and why would I ever want to give them up if I'm not... you know, getting sad again? I worry about it too, more than I should. Those were bad days; I don't want to repeat them. Sometimes my worry about that makes me sign up for yet more things to try and stave it off, as if this last one will be the one that pushes the anxiety out. What actually happens is that the anxiety just relocates itself to time I'm supposed to be sleeping, and then I get even more exhausted.
The fact is that as much as I love the people in my life, as much as I'm thrilled and grateful that they invite me to things and want to talk to me and spend time with me, as much as I love meeting a new person and discovering that we click, I am still super introverted. I can't appreciate the People Time if I don't get the Me Time, and right now I am getting zero guilt-free Me Time. The only time I spend with myself is time when I've flaked out of doing something, and then I spend the whole evening feeling shitty about the fact that I flaked. I need to do less. I need to have time for me. I need to do what I used to do; just walk to a field or a wood or a common and sit for a while, reading or listening to music or just thinking, losing track of the time and leaving when I felt like it, be that twenty minutes or four hours later.
I was on a train the other day, travelling through Somerset countryside, and I saw an old man standing on a bridge. He had a camera with him, resting on the bridge wall next to him, but he wasn't taking photos, just leaning on the wall and staring off. The sky was blue and there was nobody else in sight, except the people whizzing by on the railway, barely even there. It's been a long time since I wanted to be somebody else as much as I wanted to be that old West Country man on a railway bridge, watching the time pass by and knowing that it didn't matter.
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