litch | Entries tagged with scared

Since I did the sad on the couch I have been fuck-all for getting away from it. I can't seem to stop being sad except for some brief breaks of fear and anger(fear), the best I can manage is to distract myself with a problem at work or otherwise fill myself with busy.

This is what scares me about living in the now, that I will pierce the dike and be subsumed by my emotions. That I will feel so sad or scared that I can't feel anything else and that I will never be able to stop feeling it. I realized driving home tonight I can quantify how scared and sad I am, I am as scared/sad as I am fat. Considering my BMI is 46, that's pretty wrought.

I feel sad every time I slow down enough to really feel my emotions, and scared most of the time I am moving at speed. I don't have a whole hell of a lot objectively to be all that sad or scared about, but that doesn't matter at all emotions exist outside of reason.

I've been showing a lot of depression signs lately, easily angry for no obvious reason, not getting things done I want, gaining weight, increased inebrient use, sleeping lots, not remembering or thinking well, etc.

So today I am trying, on the assumption depression is the reaction our mind makes to unwanted thoughts and feelings, to take some time out to feel the sad and scared I'm trying to repress. I just spent half an hour on the couch, not watching tv, reading, or doing anything else distracting and payed attention to how my body feels and letting that lead me into my emotions.

The first thing I felt was like a weight on my shoulders, my chest felt sunk and it was surt of like sitting in a dentists chair when they put the lead apron on you. This is sadness in me. I am sad about the upcoming aniversary of my father's death, which led me to the sad that I can't even remember when my mom died. I'm sad my dogs are not as trained as I want (they were pestering me to go play and not just sit on the couch doing nothing and moping), that I don't consistently make the time and effort to play with and train them like I expect from myself. I'm sad about the condition of my siding and roof, I started to get angry at myself for not doing anything about it and used that as lead into my fear (since anger is fear in leather).

I am scared I am incapable of maintaining a house, I have an unreasonable expectation that I can and will do everything my house needs. I was scared that the county was going to make me register my dogs as aggressive (I didn't shut the door completely after lunch monday and they got out, someone called Animal Control on another dog up the street and they saw my guys in the front yard and shoo'ed the two big ones in the open front door and neighbor stuck tip in their yard when she ran, they left a couple hang tags on the door with some fright quotes from the new travis county regulations) and that would cause me to lose my house insurance.

I'm scared I will never be a success at work, while that's not horribly important to me (especially in the long term) I am scared I will get sucked into the comfortable but not successful work niche & never get a graduate degree.

I'm scared I will never have the intimate friendships I've had in the past. The ones now seem like paltry shadows to my memories of the party societies I was in before. I am afraid of fading away.

That was about as much emotion as I could comfortably process, so I sat here to write this down and now I am off to the dog park to burn some doggy energy.

One of the women in group recently was talking about an issue that meshed with me from the other side. She was upstairs and saw her toddler walking around with a sharp pencil, got scared and hollered down to her husband to take it away, he looked up, looked at the kid, and said "he's fine" so she ran down stairs, took the pencil away and was upset that he would ignore her fears like that.

I had that fight dozens of times with nancy.

I could imagine being him all too clearly, you're doing something and the kid you are supposed to be watching starts to do something modestly dangerous and then all of the sudden your wife is screaming at you with that voice, that parental scold demanding immediate action from you. I (and apparently he) don't react well in situations like that. There's an immediate sense of shame at someone else pointing out a problem you should be aware of, calling your judgement, maturity, and capability into question and finding it wanting for letting it happen and not doing anything about it. Following that so closely you don't even really become aware of that feeling and just respond defensively, minimizing the danger, implying they're over reacting, and going into full passive mode.

Intellectually, it's obvious that what's motivating the screetch in the first place is fear but emotionally I react like it's a grab for control of the situation. It might not even be a situation with much obvious control content, but especially when the person you're married to has general control issues in the first place the sudden exacerbation that that tone just triggers a knee jerk response in me like someone had just cracked a whip over my head.

The suggestion we eventually came up with is to see if she could let more of her fear through in her voice in those kinds of situations, push up the opportuntity for him to come to the rescue and be a hero. For her to actively cede control of the situation to him.

Current Mood: sad

I just talked to a guy with a cool name, "Bruce Strange". One of the cheap amusements of my chosen professions is encountering cool, unusual or otherwise interesting names.

Two and a half hours ago when i started this message I was irritable, no reason I could figure out, just easily irked. Now I am just pissed, everybody seems to be out to annoy the fuck out of me.

I was feeling irritable last night when I went to group therapy, and talked about it. One of the tropes I have learned there is that when I am angry at everything in the universe it's probably that I am angry at myself and I was trying to figure out why I am angry at myself and what the sadness or fear that underlies the anger.

The only thing I can come up with that I might be angry at myself about is my failure to do all my chores, like changing the a/c filter every month or getting my truck fixed/inspected/registered. The fear beneath that is that I can't competently run my life, do all the chores I need to do to get through my life without something I could prevent exploding in my face.

The stupid thing is that I am actually pretty good about doing that sort of stuff, better than most people at least. I just have this terror I am going to forget to do something I know I need to do and it is going to burn me and it will be all my fault. And it's a rediculous terror, I know shit happens and I am capable of taking care of it and getting out the other side with minimal scarification but the idea of failing some simple chore and having that lead directly to something worse happening just fills me with dread.

Current Mood: annoyed

so I was trying to watch tv and I started hearing this buzz, I'd put a fan in the in the upstairs window and I thought it might be the fan vibrating against the sill but when I went up I heard it coming from the HVAC.

I have everything set to off so I couldn't figure out what could be buzzing, I pulled the front plate and looked around inside and determined it was the heaters electric igniter firing constantly. Tried to pull the power cables and got shocked for my effort, looped a non-conducter around the black and then the white wire and popped them off the circuit board but it kept humming away.

I finally popped the breaker and it quit. This is upsetting me a lot, the I am scared of my house being broke, the heat is just miserable, it's 87 in the house and 86 outside. I worry that my sloppy maintenance has caused this, hell I know my sloppy maintenance has caused this and I feel miserable and like I deserve even more misery.

Crap, it's started again, evidently that braker only controls the outside unit, now I get to play guess the heater igniter circuit, so down the computer

Current Mood: guilty

My a/c wasn't cooling well, so fearing that it had frozen up I checked the filter and found it needed changing, replaced it with a new one and turned off the A/c and left the fan on to melt any ice blockage and poured some bleach down the drain to kill any mold that might be backing up the tube.

It kept cutting out, so afraid it was over heating the fan I turned everything to off. It went off but it kept pulsing like it was trying to turn on than changing it's mind. After 5-10 minutes it stopped that and I decided I'd call strand tomorrow to come look at it (I was wonder what was going to cost me 400$ this month).

After half an hour I tried to turn the fan back on, nothing.

Checked all the breakers, found a gfci that had popped (but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the HVAC, it's something for the bath I believe) and reset it. Still nothing.

Took the front panel off and it looks like there is power getting there (there's an LED on the circuit board that's lit up) but discovered a puddle of water at the bottom. Mopped it up and when I checked the new filter found it was full of water as well, pulled it, poured the water out and left it out to dry, poked around as much as I was comfortable but couldn't figure out the secret to making the fan come on.

It's 82 in the house, 92 outside and expected to rise until it hits 100 sometime this evening.
Edit6:15 and it is 86 in here and 99 outside (according to joebot)
Edit8:30 and it is 87 in here and 92 outside (according to joebot)

Current Mood: hot

I've been angry today. Finding my coworkers irksome, customers inane, friends dull, and the universe as a whole unsatisfactory. It says something that my first thought upon realizing that is to wonder what I am scared of or sad about.

The thing that comes to mind is that I am sad about my divorce. It's been just over a year since Nancy moved out. I look back on my journal entries from last june and I am startled how little is in there, almost nothing of consequence. I can't remember my feelings from back then very clearly, there was so much anxiety and pain in the flashes I do allow myself to recall I wonder if that might not be a boon. My boss was just laughing about a time I got inapproriately upset about building management warning us they'd tow us if we parked in the wrong spot and I remember that that was from this time. I made a series of career limiting emotional displays that first summer at postini. It's placed a hard ceiling on my career here, it is clear though unsaid that I will not be considered for a management track.

My life is so much calmer now than it was then. There was always the effort of creeping around the edges of the eterna-fight just waiting to goose me into idiocy. I am happier but I worry about what kind of future is front of me, I feel like damaged goods, like everyone who knows me knows exactly how close they are willing to let themself get to me and ain't nobody dumb enough to allow themselves to get into any sort of real emotional intimacy with the trainwreck in the franz-joseph (that's what my face hairis called).

I'm also scared I'll never get to the level of financial comfort I want. I was so excited about having free cash but it didn't work out that way. Then I had 400$ in car repair I wasn't expecting and another 400$ for the vet last week. A few hundred here and a few hundred there starts to add up to serious money in very short order. This difficulty is scary because I base a lot of my self-worth on my ability to take care of myself financially. It's not about how much I make so much but "can I make enough, doing what I want and how I want (to a reasonable degree of aproximation) to live the way I want", I am working too hard and living too close for my comfort.

Current Mood: tired

sphinxie asked me to talk about relationships and I've been avoiding it because it scares me, I am still afraid of it but I am putting myself in a justaposition of two things I am reluctant to do that I do want to do; this, and working on my yard.

I am going to make a couple attempts at talking about relationships, so I can have a decent tag thread for it (and feel free to go through and add tags to any of my old posts you come accross).

So why does talking about relationships scare me?

Relationships scare me because they have power; they can be used to hurt me or they can hurt just because of their nature. I will do things I don't like and don't enjoy because of my relationships. I fundamentally alter who and what I am because of relationships. The most precious things in my life are relationships, and I am afraid (hell, I know) talking about them, especially talking about them publically, changes them.

So as you can see rationships are so lemonpepper I simply can't talk about them right now.

Current Mood: puckish
Current Music: cessna drone

( whining )

Current Mood: sad

I am afraid I fucked up my truck engine. I was late getting back to work from lunch and just kept driving it even though it had started making scary noises. The A/C went out on my way home for lunch, but I just figured it wasn't draining well and had frozen up, when I got home it was hissing and I smelled antifreeze which didn't really fit with the freezing idea but there was plent of coolant in the reservoir and everything looked ok.

It started up and drove fine, a/c stopped again half down parmer, but I was late and just turned it off. Merged onto mopac and noticed it was making noises, valve clatter when I accelerate like I hear when I let the oil get a little low but I just topped off the oil late last week. Started to worry that I had put too much in and it was frothing from the crankshaft, but the oil pressure was fine. The check engine light came on and I thought about pulling over but I was less than a mile from work and twitching about being late. I pulled into the garage and parked and as I got out it was making the full blow overheating sounds and fog show.

My thermometer gage has been dead for well over a year, but it seemed a pretty minor thing I could put off. I'd still have the idiot light. Guess my thermostat died. What I am really scared of is that in pushing it to get to work I blew the head gasket.

Current Mood: scared

This guy from work got fired last friday, for failing to adhere to an improvement plan. I'm sorry to see him go, he was a nice guy, he and his girlfriend were part of the group from work I went to see star wars with on opening night. He's decidedly technically competent but his work skills (getting to work on time, document everything, etc) just didn't cut it. I look at that with a great deal of trepidation, that's how I tend to fuck up at work. I'm not having a problem, but I like what I am doing and the people I work with and my life is pretty good right now. I feel like I could fall down that oiled cascade of broken glass anytime, it's just one loss of balance away.

This was from a work lunch, the girl he's talking to is Carrie, she's our HR person here in Austin. They both used to work at High-End systems at the same time and had a number of common friends.