Post by Sam on Mar 5, 2019 22:09:41 GMT
I've been daydreaming a lot the past few days. It's actually gotten worse since I deleted all of my social media apps. When I was daydreaming this last time, I noticed myself wanting to yell something along the lines of "give it to me." But its not a part of my daydream, its me wanting to have what my daydream self has. I get these almost unconscious messages from my psyche on a regular basis.
Slight backstory: For a while, every time I got really angry (which was often, I have an anger issue), I found myself wanting to scream "you're poisoning me" at whoever I was around at the time. Now part of that urge came from my paranoia and thinking that the reason why I'm so anxious/angry/scared all the time is because someone is actually poisoning me. That happened on a regular basis for a few months until I finally listened to what my psyche was trying to tell me. And it wasn't that someone was poisoning me. It was that I was poisoning myself by allowing my brain to work itself up into a rage. And once I realized that, the anger abated. I'm not saying that I never get anger episodes anymore, but their frequency and severity have both dropped considerably.
Anyways, back to my original topic. I've known for a long time that my daydreams generally represent things that I wish I had/was like in real life. Daydream me is badass and in control and people love her and express that love (because of my isolation and the fact that most of my interactions are through the internet, I tend to have a hard time quantifying the love that people have for me). But for some reason, recently that daydream life has seemed more... real maybe? Closer? Like its just at the tips of my fingers and if I could reach out just a little bit more I would have it. Its no secret that I'm pretty bored with my life. I took a break after I graduated from high school last June specifically so that I wouldn't have anything to do. That may sound counterproductive, but there's logic behind it. If I have anything going at all, I can and will use it as an excuse to put off therapy and bettering myself. I did it all throughout high school and I still do it with other, smaller things that go on in my life. But I'm bored. I watch the same tv shows and movies over and over again (watching new ones presents two problems, a) anxiety and b) especially if its a tv show, I get the compulsive urge to keep watching and I become completely useless until I finish it) and I do pretty much the same things every day (my brain thrives on routine and if I get off routine my anxiety freaks out). So I'm bored and incredibly dissatisfied with my life.
And I want my daydream life so badly. I mean, minus all of the violence and blood and all that. The violence and blood is just there to prove to myself and other people in my daydreams that I'm badass and in control. I've been working really hard over the past 11 months to live a better life. I would say "to manage my anxiety," but since I started using acceptance and commitment therapy last October, I've realized that managing my anxiety isn't really what I want my life to be about (and it clearly doesn't work for me). My problem is that I don't seem to be making that much progress. I mean, sure I'm probably more satisfied with my life than I was a year ago, but I'm so incredibly bored that I have a hard time not drifting off into daydreams.
I've been trying/wanting to add more things in: getting back into playing chess, using Lumosity to improve my memory, going through math workbooks to keep my math knowledge in my brain (I haven't taken any math classes since calculus in my junior year, and I really don't want all of my effort to go to waste), learning a new language, etc. But even with my wealth of free time, there's only so much time in a day. And my brain works in a very all or nothing kind of way. It's like if I can't do something every single day, its just not worth doing. Which is really making things difficult.
What I really want to do is to start an online degree program, which will give me something to do and help make me feel in control and not like I'm severely falling behind my peers. But I'm not ready and I know it. Even if I could cope with the stress of the coursework, I know that I'll just be using school to avoid dealing with my anxiety and creating a better life for myself. @ self: dude, there's no point in getting a degree if you can't do anything with it because you're too anxious to leave the house. And, of course, I got kind of upset after realizing this, which just made me want to daydream more, which in turn makes me more bored and dissatisfied with my real life.
I'm not sure what my original point of writing this was (thanks shitty memory), but I'm just really bored with my life. And despite recording everything I do in a day on multiple occasions, I still have no clue where my time is going. Sure, I spend probably 2 hours a day doing mindfulness stuff, but like, when I added the time I usually spend on every task up, there was a good 2-3 hours of my waking time unaccounted for. I'm so confused. Where is my time going? Whatever. I'm gonna try to create a list of all of the things that I want to be doing and come up with a reasonable amount of time for me to do them each week (ie "I'll use Lumosity 3 days a week" or something like that) and then see what happens. No matter how long or intensely I daydream, I can't have my daydream life exactly how it is. There is no instant gratification. Creating a better life for myself is gonna take a lot of work and I'll never be able to commit fully if I've got one foot (mind foot?) in my daydream world. I think that the hardest challenge facing me is figuring out what I really want out of life. I never really had the chance to discover what I like doing and what I want to do before I isolated myself, so it can be difficult for me to figure out those things. And then there's the perpetual worried thoughts about whether I'm doing too much or too little and what other people think and if what I'm doing is actually right for me...
And there. I've wasted half an hour of my day typing this. Wait. No, Sam, its not a waste to express how you're feeling. Yes, I know that you might not view this as productive, but it is because you aren't allowed to bottle things up. (Sorry, I'm used to ranting on Twitter, where I generally talk to myself in the tweets, I know it looks weird but its important for me to do).
Slight backstory: For a while, every time I got really angry (which was often, I have an anger issue), I found myself wanting to scream "you're poisoning me" at whoever I was around at the time. Now part of that urge came from my paranoia and thinking that the reason why I'm so anxious/angry/scared all the time is because someone is actually poisoning me. That happened on a regular basis for a few months until I finally listened to what my psyche was trying to tell me. And it wasn't that someone was poisoning me. It was that I was poisoning myself by allowing my brain to work itself up into a rage. And once I realized that, the anger abated. I'm not saying that I never get anger episodes anymore, but their frequency and severity have both dropped considerably.
Anyways, back to my original topic. I've known for a long time that my daydreams generally represent things that I wish I had/was like in real life. Daydream me is badass and in control and people love her and express that love (because of my isolation and the fact that most of my interactions are through the internet, I tend to have a hard time quantifying the love that people have for me). But for some reason, recently that daydream life has seemed more... real maybe? Closer? Like its just at the tips of my fingers and if I could reach out just a little bit more I would have it. Its no secret that I'm pretty bored with my life. I took a break after I graduated from high school last June specifically so that I wouldn't have anything to do. That may sound counterproductive, but there's logic behind it. If I have anything going at all, I can and will use it as an excuse to put off therapy and bettering myself. I did it all throughout high school and I still do it with other, smaller things that go on in my life. But I'm bored. I watch the same tv shows and movies over and over again (watching new ones presents two problems, a) anxiety and b) especially if its a tv show, I get the compulsive urge to keep watching and I become completely useless until I finish it) and I do pretty much the same things every day (my brain thrives on routine and if I get off routine my anxiety freaks out). So I'm bored and incredibly dissatisfied with my life.
And I want my daydream life so badly. I mean, minus all of the violence and blood and all that. The violence and blood is just there to prove to myself and other people in my daydreams that I'm badass and in control. I've been working really hard over the past 11 months to live a better life. I would say "to manage my anxiety," but since I started using acceptance and commitment therapy last October, I've realized that managing my anxiety isn't really what I want my life to be about (and it clearly doesn't work for me). My problem is that I don't seem to be making that much progress. I mean, sure I'm probably more satisfied with my life than I was a year ago, but I'm so incredibly bored that I have a hard time not drifting off into daydreams.
I've been trying/wanting to add more things in: getting back into playing chess, using Lumosity to improve my memory, going through math workbooks to keep my math knowledge in my brain (I haven't taken any math classes since calculus in my junior year, and I really don't want all of my effort to go to waste), learning a new language, etc. But even with my wealth of free time, there's only so much time in a day. And my brain works in a very all or nothing kind of way. It's like if I can't do something every single day, its just not worth doing. Which is really making things difficult.
What I really want to do is to start an online degree program, which will give me something to do and help make me feel in control and not like I'm severely falling behind my peers. But I'm not ready and I know it. Even if I could cope with the stress of the coursework, I know that I'll just be using school to avoid dealing with my anxiety and creating a better life for myself. @ self: dude, there's no point in getting a degree if you can't do anything with it because you're too anxious to leave the house. And, of course, I got kind of upset after realizing this, which just made me want to daydream more, which in turn makes me more bored and dissatisfied with my real life.
I'm not sure what my original point of writing this was (thanks shitty memory), but I'm just really bored with my life. And despite recording everything I do in a day on multiple occasions, I still have no clue where my time is going. Sure, I spend probably 2 hours a day doing mindfulness stuff, but like, when I added the time I usually spend on every task up, there was a good 2-3 hours of my waking time unaccounted for. I'm so confused. Where is my time going? Whatever. I'm gonna try to create a list of all of the things that I want to be doing and come up with a reasonable amount of time for me to do them each week (ie "I'll use Lumosity 3 days a week" or something like that) and then see what happens. No matter how long or intensely I daydream, I can't have my daydream life exactly how it is. There is no instant gratification. Creating a better life for myself is gonna take a lot of work and I'll never be able to commit fully if I've got one foot (mind foot?) in my daydream world. I think that the hardest challenge facing me is figuring out what I really want out of life. I never really had the chance to discover what I like doing and what I want to do before I isolated myself, so it can be difficult for me to figure out those things. And then there's the perpetual worried thoughts about whether I'm doing too much or too little and what other people think and if what I'm doing is actually right for me...
And there. I've wasted half an hour of my day typing this. Wait. No, Sam, its not a waste to express how you're feeling. Yes, I know that you might not view this as productive, but it is because you aren't allowed to bottle things up. (Sorry, I'm used to ranting on Twitter, where I generally talk to myself in the tweets, I know it looks weird but its important for me to do).
