I am sitting here this morning in my corner of our bedroom, just finished breakfast, drinking some Irish breakfast tea, and trying to figure out what to write about. Every time I sit down I have ten or more ideas in my head of what subject to talk about, but as soon as my fingers touch the keyboard my brain blanks. I want to talk about my childhood, the things I’ve seen, what I’ve gone through, what it’s taught me, and how it shaped me. Thinking about that makes me realize that a lot of how I was shaped as a kid was reshaped as a teen, then reshaped again in my twenties, then again in my thirties, and now is being reshaped as I am typing this in my forties. It feels like every ten years my life goes through some giant and dramatic changes, and here I am at 40, and I’m just waiting for the next bunch of big giant changes to happen. I am waiting, and nervous, and freaking right the fuck out.
I have no idea what those changes will be, but I can feel them coming on. It’s like my own Spider Sense, but instead of for immanent danger, it warns me of big changes coming. Unlike a Spider Sense where he is able to figure out what is coming and dodge it, my sense tells me something is coming, just not what or when or why or how. It tells me to be aware that something big is about to happen, that something is going to change, that I need to be prepared. It’s just hard to be aware and prepared when I have no idea what the change will be, how it will affect me, or even when it will come about. How do you prepare for the unknown when there is so much in life that could change in an instant without warning. How do I know what change is the big change that the sense is trying to warn me about?
This is my life. This is my mind every day. It spends all it’s time fretting over the future and what’s coming up and trying to be prepared for every possible outcome. It’s impossible to be prepared for every possible outcome but that doesn’t stop my mind from trying. I don’t mean that I try to just have a plan prepared for the major possible outcomes, oh no, that would be way to simple and easy to handle. No, my brain tries to look at every single possible outcome, every single possible way that something could go, and tries to figure out how to deal with every single one of them. Not just how I should react to them, but also tries to guess how everyone else around me is going to react to them as well. I’m sure you have had full on conversations in your head where you are practicing for a real conversation coming up, or how you should have responded to a previous conversation. Now imagine doing that, for every possible outcome of a situation, all day, every day, without fail. Imagine spending your life always trying to be one step ahead of EVERYTHING all the time.
Imagine you are on your way home, and you know that you are about to have a difficult situation with someone when you get there. So on the way you start preparing yourself for the conversation to come. You go over everything that you want to say, everything you think they might say, and how you would handle the emotions that are bound to come up. That’s normal right? Most everyone does that. Now, take that same idea, but expound upon it. Not only does my brain do that, but it figures out conversations for if the person is happy, or sad, or angry, or depressed. It figures out how I am going to talk about it to anyone else afterward, and how they might respond to the situation. It tries to figure out how to handle it if I say something wrong that could come back to bite me later. It tries to figure out how to react to the other person, not just with words, but also with tones of voice and facial expression and body language. It tries to figure out every single possible outcome, and then, when the moment arrives, it’s so overwhelmed with it’s own attempts to figure the situation out ahead of time, that if the other person doesn’t act in one of the many ways I tried to prepare for, I panic and freeze. If they say anything that goes outside of what I was ready for, I have no idea how to react. At least, not until afterward, when I’m by myself, and then all the possible responses coming pouring out into my thoughts as if by some miracle just thinking of them will fix all of it. It goes over every possible thing I could have said instead of what I did say, and then just sits there while I beat myself up for not having thought of those things in the moment.
So here I am, at the ten year mark, waiting for big changes that my sense is telling me is on the way, freaking out over every possible option and circumstance that could arise. Constantly stuck in my own head to the point that the rest of the world just fades away. So worried about what’s coming next that I am missing all of what’s happening now. So desperate to cling on to what I have now, that I miss any chance of what comes next being a good thing. So wrapped up in my own misery and depression and self loathing that I can’t see that life is always changing around me. Everything always changes, that is just the nature of how life works. Life never stops, never quits, never gives up. It is we as humans who stop and quit and give up. It is me and my neurodivergent brain that always thinks up all the worst possible outcomes to focus on rather than enjoying the ride.
I have never known how to just enjoy the ride of life. That aspect of life has always eluded me. I have always been this person who must always be mentally prepared for everything. I have always been the person that tries to plan every single possible thing as far in advance as I can so as not to be surprised by anything. I want to make it stop, I want to learn to just enjoy life. I want to be able to just wake up in the morning and not instantly start fretting over what is going on, and what may be going on, and what could possibly maybe happen with what is going on. I don’t want to be that person anymore, I just am not sure where that switch is to turn that part of me off. I don’t know what magic words will make it go away, or if there is even some way to train my Spider Sense to work with me and get me more info than just, “hey, change is coming, time to panic”. I desperately want to do better, and I am actively trying to do better, it just often feels like an incredibly hopeless endeavor. But I am not giving up.
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