Oh boy. Life things happened today. Uncomfortable emotions. I did not like the way that felt. It took hours to push through. I wanted to pull the covers over my head. My waves of tolerable emotion were building to hurricane force winds and I wanted a beer and a nap. Hello, avoidance, my old friend.

Instead I did as much as I could to face and resolve these life things without ending up at the bottom of a shame spiral ruminating on my own inadequacy. Then I went to the gym and ran until I started to worry that my legs, devoid of all substrates, might simply stop working. I laughed at myself because after two hours of burning off energy like a frantic lab rat, my poor anxiety riddled brain still managed to construct a visual image of my legs collapsing. My body being flung from the treadmill. My death becoming a weird news story that people share on facebook and judge me for not wearing the little emergency stop cord that nobody uses.  Despite my conviction that certain doom and humiliation is lurking just under the treadmill, I did feel better.

That, kids, is 50 Shades of Anxiety. It’s a spectrum of ridiculous reactions to stimuli. Or even better, ridiculous reactions to no effing stimuli at all. Anywhere from losing your actual hearing in a panic attack that ran up on you for no reason to a low-level suspicion that the ladder you forgot to put away will get hit by lightning and catch the house on fire. So on our spectrum of self-created terror, I dialed it down from “holy shit, I can’t tolerate this feeling, I want to be unconscious or at least very fuzzy, where is the bottle opener???” to “oh my god, self, can you please stop looking for things to worry about?”

Tomorrow I will have to continue high level adulting. I don’t want to. I would like to outsource that. I don’t have anyone to whom to outsource the drudgery of adult life. You know what I *do* like about adulting? I own my own thermostat. I can set my AC on 65 if I want to. I am trying to look at handling my emotions like that. Like I am in control of where I set my thermostat. There can be 100 degrees of external heat but I can choose to be cooooool. There was some sputtering and momentary overheating today but basically I got back to 70 if not 65. I’ll take it as a win.