Anxiety All Along
On this coming Tuesday, my husband packs up his truck heads out to Connecticut. I will pack up my own car and follow on Thursday.
And I’m anxious. I’m not anxious about the move itself. I have already secured the apartment, set up the utilities, scheduled the internet tech, all of the little annoying parts of moving. When I first started this lifestyle, the moving did make me anxious. I was not used to things like credit checks and calling utility companies. But in the past 8 years since my husband and I have been living mostly on the road, the world has changed in ways that make all of these things easier. It moved from scanning and emailing and printing PDF copies of documents and leases, to all electronic interactions, including digital signatures and internet portals, paperless billing and autopay.
But the job I will be doing this time is not the job I have been doing. Or at least not most of it. I am not running this job. I am not tracking cost on this job. I am not responsible for every little thing on this job. You would think that would make me less anxious. You would be wrong.
I have a lot of anxiety. Or you know what? Maybe I don’t. Perhaps I have about the same anxiety as everybody else. Or perhaps I even have less. But it affects me in big ways. It gives me nagging thoughts and prickly fears. And in retrospect, after 15 years of having my eating under control, I know that it is a big part of why I ate sugar and ate compulsively.
They say that if you want to know why you eat compulsively (or smoke, or drink alcohol, or gamble, or whatever your poison is) stop. You’ll figure it out real quick. When eating was an option for me, I never had to notice the anxiety. As soon as I got even the slightest whiff of it, I could put something in my mouth. At that point, it was all happening in my subconscious. I never had to let it see the light of day.
But when I stopped eating compulsively, and started to eat within my boundaries, when there was nothing to numb me or get me high, I started to really experience my own anxiety.
The deal is that once I started to really sit in it and with it, my anxiety started to affect me less. Do I have less of it? I don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt the way it used to. I am not itchy in my skin the way I once was. Now it’s background noise.
But here I am going to a new place with new work colleagues doing a new job I haven’t done before. And I am worried.
WHAT IF I AM NOT EXCELLENT AT IT?!?!??
When I put it like that, it sounds ridiculous, even to me. I may not be excellent. But of course, I may. The point is, that people do all levels of work, from down right bad, to spectacular. And I will do the best I can and even in a worst case scenario, that will probably still be pretty good. And if it is not, well, then I will see what I can do to make it better.
For someone who has changed cities, and jobs, and lifestyles as often as I have, you would think I would be much calmer about it. But maybe the point is that I don’t have to be calm about it to do it. I don’t have to like the way it feels to get things done. And every time I get things done, even when I don’t want to, and every time I do it without eating a chocolate cake, I realize that it can be done. And without eating a chocolate cake! That I can do it. And that the way I feel about it doesn’t really matter.
onceafatgirl 