Intrusive thoughts… For starters, what in the hell and secondly, why in the hell?
I do not recall signing up for intrusive thoughts. Not even a little bit. And you know what happens when I try to expel them, nothing, they just stick around in the shadows until they can catch me unawares again.
Today I discovered that a friend from high school that I had reconnected with also had her own blog. That’s exciting right?
I’m really excited for her. So I went and checked it out, hit subscribe, started looking through the website. It’s really cute and well done. She’s kept things quite minimalistic and there’s a coming soon page, or rather a work in progress page.
She writes about anxiety and how she’s grown as a person, finding peace and calm in the little things.
All of this should fill me with joy and pride that my friend has started this whole thing for herself.
Right?
Most of me feels like that. Most of me is excited and ready to support her the best I can. Then there’s this little part of me that shouting over the rest of me, “No bitch, this just became a competition.”
When in the ever loving shitballs did this become a competition. When and why?
This tiny little thought will not go away either. It just keeps coming back. It keeps telling me that if I go and read her blog posts then anything I write or blog about from that moment onwards will be a derivative of what she’s written and therefor I cannot read what she’s written or I’ll just be copying it…Except…we write totally different things.
It keeps telling me that if she has more people following her blog or her Instagram than I do then I’ve failed. But that’s not how it actually works at all. Not even close.
I’ve read through her whole blog and I really enjoyed it. It had me thinking about the different things that I do when I’m feeling stressed or unfulfilled. I’ve started thinking about where I might be able to slot those ten minutes of quiet time to decompress and deal with all the emotions and negative thoughts from my day.
Let’s be honest though. More often than not I’m just a tall ball of rage and exhaustion.
That’s unlikely to change until I get out of retail and then I’ll probably find something else to be a pent up rage ball about.
I think the thing that I need to try and remember more than anything else is that just because my retail job is a constant political minefield, you wouldn’t think so given that it’s retail but go figure, doesn’t mean that everything else in life is.
I am not constantly in competition with friends or family. Just because they’ve gotten to a certain point in their life doesn’t mean that I must also be at that point. Just because they’ve spent more time or effort on something doesn’t mean that I have to hate it because it’s better than mine. I just need to spend more time and effort on my stuff until I love it as much as the angry little gremlin in the back of my mind wants to hate what they’ve done.
There is so much that I wish I had accomplished in the past week. I have lists on lists. I’m not even kidding.
But the things I’ve been able to tick off the to-do list is only half. And two of them were literally making the to-do and food list for the next week. They were the ‘gimmes’, the easy ones that I knew I’d get done no matter what and it’d make me feel like I accomplished something really important when really I just figured out what order in which I was going to throw food together for the six days.
So just like my friend went about cleaning out her closet of all the stuff she didn’t need, I’m going to try cleaning out the gremlins in my mind and not let them convince me that I need to be competing with everyone around me. Because let’s be realistic. I’m very lazy. Not once did I volunteer to compete at school carnivals. I volunteered to stay home. Any competition is just going to see me sitting back and being bitter about my own laziness until my own self-imposed deadline comes up and I force myself to do everything at the last minute.
For anyone who is interested in taking a look in my friend’s blog here’s a link —> https://www.simplyrhi.com.au/
S.J Smith Books 