30102013
These days I often get this feeling
that I don't want to do anything at all but to sit down and entertain
myself. I started to wonder how exactly I accumulate this experience,
and I realized that HEY, this state of being is a symptom of
something I accept and allow in myself. People don't “just become”
unable to function out of physical tiredness: when one is physically
tired after a long day, it can be slept off, but this “I don't want
to do shit” -experience appears even when I am NOT physically tired
and would have plenty of energy to do other stuff.
I noticed this just now when I had
gotten myself onto my couch to scribble some nonograms and I realized
that I had physically drawn myself into a very withdrawn position
with my knees against my chest, head down, toes curled and breathing
shallow. I looked at myself and thought: “what am I hiding from?”,
and I remembered a moment of self-judgement just half an hour before
and realized it had added on top of my weariness and become the
catalyst for me withdrawing.
What else has happened during my day to
make me want to hide and withdraw?
For the entire day I have been bothered
by a discussion I had yesterday which I think did not go as well as
it should have. I went through the topic of the discussion in
writing, found certainty in my point of view and made a decision to
return to the topic with the person involved, but I didn't realize
that the reason I was bothered by this discussion was because I
judged myself to have “failed” in the discussion because we did
not end up in a clear solution / consensus. So this point of
self-judgement has followed me and weighed me down all day.
I went to work in the morning and
throughout my shift I noticed these small moments of self-judgement
coming up. My morning shift includes cleaning up the bar, and unless
I start early enough and work overtime, I might not finish the task
before it's time to open up the bar – and when I “fail” this
task, I judge myself, and it shows in how I treat the customers,
because on some passive-aggressive level I take it out on them. Today
that moment of self-evaluation was there, but because I had started
work half an hour early and finished cleaning on time, my
self-evaluation was positive and I tipped over to the other polarity
where I was overly cheerful with all the customers.
However, there were other moments where
I noticed stress coming up (I feel it instantly as tension in my
shoulders) when I feared that I might “fail” a task. During
morning shifts these moments usually come up when I have to leave the
cash register unguarded to pick up some stuff from the storage,
because I fear someone will come and rob the bar the very minute I
turn my back, which would make my employers disappointed and angry
with me and perhaps result in some legal consequences. So because
there was a lot of stuff I had to pick up from the storage, these
moments kept adding up to the feeling of “failure” that had
already been gnawing me since last night. On top of that, right after
I left work my employer gave me feedback about a mistake I had made
with the register last week, and I thought of myself as “stupid”
for being so careless.
It appears I really fear disappointing
my employers (authorities). This links directly to my experiences
with school: trying to do well to please the teachers and my parents.
In the evening I read a comment in the
internet with which I judged myself as “stupid”. With this moment
of self-judgement I instantly withdrew from the internet, curled up
on the couch, watched a little TV and curled up even more to scribble
because just sitting up straight felt too heavy. Interesting in
retrospect to look at what I did, because it all happened without me
having direct control over my doings – I was not directing myself
at all, but moving as if on autopilot. It's as if the negative
feeling within me (self-judgement, heaviness, smallness) was pulling
me into this tense little ball, like a hedgehog defending itself from
the world.
Fascinating. Tomorrow,
self-forgiveness.
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