Messages to myself

Your head does funny things to you when you have too much time to think.  Since separation from my employer, my thinker has been on overdrive.  It doesn’t help to know that these circumstances were beyond my control.  I have a tendency to punish myself repeatedly for the lack of perfection.  I grew up as a first born.  My life is supposed to be perfection personified.

It isn’t.  I have a mental health disability-panic attack with agoraphobia, anxiety attacks, Mood disorder, and PTSD.  I don’t talk to trees or telephone poles (unless they talk first-ha-ha).  I have nothing contagious.  I live in reality, the same as you.  I just get over hyped about things and can’t seem to calm back down.  This makes it very difficult to be in public, as crowds increase the issues.  I get hyper focused on things, like needing a feeding chair for the baby we occasionally watch.  It’s kind of ironic, as this is what I did for my job, helping people learn to live and adapt for MH D/O (mental health disorders).

So dealing with the public and not being able to deal with the public don’t go together as far as employment goes.  CF&CS were very kind and did what they could.  You could not do my job from home, even if counseling was taken out of the picture.  My disability, despite my education, has rendered it impossible for me to work outside my home.  Yet SSI/DA has denied my claim-"you can work."  So I have the doctor saying it is a debilitating disability, my former employer saying they cannot modify any further to meet my disability needs, my checkbook saying, “Dude, you is broke,” and my perfectionism saying, “Get a job already!”

The guilt comes from that perfectionism.  I could not/cannot control the panic/anxiety, even with meds.  The perfectionism says that I am a “loser” for not being able to pull it together and hold on to the job I had for 10 years.  Now I cannot find that resume/letters of recommendation.  Another notch down. So I need to find a way to restate the messages to myself, or I will go nowhere fast.

Perfectionism sucks.  Be kind with the messages we give to ourselves.  We matter-how we feel about ourselves matters.