And on the worst days
When it feels like life weighs ten thousand tons
(I Am Disappeared ~ Frank Turner, 2011)
I know this sounds rather depressing, so I better start with saying, that I am not. Depressed, I mean. At least I don’t think I am. I don’t know. Anyway, those words seem to resonate with me a lot these days. And I hate that.
I know in the last few months I started a lot of my posts – rare as those posts were to begin with – with something like “I’m in a weird mood, I’m feeling off…” or something similar vague. I just don’t know how to quite put this weird mood into words.
As long as I can remember I’ve been a “glass half empty” kind of person. I think I wrote about that here a few years ago. I’ve always suffered from low self-esteem, self-doubt, from worrying too much, from taking things too personal and all those messed up ways of thinking that make life so very, very hard sometimes. But for most of the past few years I handled it ok. I would even say that I’ve handled it even better in my thirties than when I was in my twenties. Don’t even ask about my teenage years.
For instance, as scared as I was 1.5 years ago about all the changes the new job would bring, I handled them quite well at first. Or at least much better than I expected to. But recently I feel much more overwhelmed with certain tasks at work and I return to old habits of avoiding and procrastinating. What’s really bothering me now though is that all of this seems to creep into my private life as well.
I worry too much. I dwell too much on things that have happened. Things someone said to me or things I said to someone. Stupid, tiny, insignificant stuff actually. But I always, always blow it way out of proportions. I feel constantly criticized or not taken seriously or misunderstood and… I don’t know. What I do know is, that I don’t like this state of mind and I’m really doing my best to work against it. Which isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s rather difficult.
Man, this does sound rather depressing, doesn’t it? But I do my best to not let it get to me too much. One of the new habit I try to form is to sit down every evening (or during the day) and write down the good moments of the day. At first I sometimes had a hard time to either remember or even acknowledge these good moments and that scared me a bit, because not seeing anything positive in the day, is definitely depressing. I know that much even with my limited amateur knowledge of psychology.
So I force myself to write down a few good things every evening. Sometimes it’s rather ordinary stuff, but at least it helps me to acknowledge the many, many, wonderful good things in my life.
Writing Publishing this post will go onto this list as well, because I think it’s a good thing to kind of publicly admit that at the moment I’m feeling more blue than usual. What’s that saying? The first step to solving a problem is acknowleding there is one? I can check that off my list then :-)
And for everything else I try to remember and live by the some other words of my favourite “desperate” poet, Frank Turner.
The only thing that’s left to do is live.
Yes, definitely words to live by. Frank’s music is one of the things that can definitely cheer me up these days. And that’s a good thing, right?