I was going to say that it\u2019s been a difficult and stressful week, but I\u2019m trying to remind myself to question that kind of totalizing narrative.<\/p>\r\n
So maybe it would be more accurate to say: It\u2019s been a complicated week for me, with a couple of particularly difficult and stressful events that I\u2019m not ready to talk about publicly.<\/p>\r\n
(No advice, please.)<\/p>\r\n
There have also been good things this week. Made a bunch of progress on the Russ-stories project. Did some house cleanup (and dealt with some papermail), thanks to an Anxious Productivity Club call with KTO. Helped with some Otherwise Award stuff. Improved my r\u00e9sum\u00e9. Made progress on my unread-books project. Made progress on triaging email. Got sympathetic support from friends. So it\u2019s not really true that the whole week has been rough. But it\u2019s easy to think of it that way if I don\u2019t push back on the generalizations my brain wants to make.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026For the previous couple of weeks, I had often been feeling kind of unfocused and adrift\u2014felt like I was having a hard time staying focused on things, with too many balls in the air and too many stressors. Though even during that period, I was making good progress on some things.<\/p>\r\n
So on Monday evening, I decided to write down (as I put it) \u201ca list of stuff that I\u2019m trying to deal with and stuff in progress.\u201d But it quickly morphed into a list of things that I was stressed and anxious about, at both big and small scales. It ended up including twelve categories of stuff, with sub-items in most of the categories.<\/p>\r\n
By the end of that exercise, I was feeling more<\/em> anxious rather than less. But I think it was nonetheless good for me to get it all written down\u2014among other things, that got me to write down some of the aspects that had gone well, and to explicitly note to myself some things I\u2019ve been avoidant about lately, and to make explicit some of the anxieties that had been kind of amorphous and vaguely ominous. And I think that in general, getting stuff written down helps me not try to hold all of it in my head at once.<\/p>\r\n And on Thursday morning, I realized that I couldn\u2019t remember what most of the items on the list were. So I looked at the list again, and found that although everything on the list is still true, I\u2019m less stressed about most of the items there than I had been on Monday night. So that\u2019s good.<\/p>\r\n Still pretty stressed about a couple of them, though.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anxiety","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20996,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995\/revisions\/20996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}