Last night's shrink session has been deliberated, cogitated and digested, as in the words of Loyd Grossman and I'm ready to put some words on the page.
On the good side of things, I didn't come out of the session as an emotional wreck. Sure, I was a little bit stirred up, but nothing like the last session.
We covered a lot of ground, mostly looking at the anxiety I've been feeling.
She's given me a couple of tasks. The first one being look at how I view my day-to-day achievements and how I gather pleasure.
As work is a bit on the dull side at the moment, there is next to no achievement to speak of there. This is a part of the work that I do - swings and roundabouts.
She said I should be deliberately thinking about what gives me a sense of accomplishment and what gives me pleasure.
And this is hard, as I'm a over-achiever who thinks nothing is ever good enough, and that I'm pretty useless and I don't deserve pleasure.
Which is crap.
We're not talking about my dislike of myself for not doing a PhD - and other than I don't have the question to be asked, nor do I want to be poor, or even more of a wanker.
She said focus on the little things.
So today, my achievements were:
- Eating healthy all day
- Not losing my rag at the cat when he insisted on using my thigh as a scratching post
- Going to the gym, upping most of my weights
- And my bench press challenge - it's just my challenge - I ended up doing one set of ten x 37.5 kg bench presses, and one set of ten x 40 kg bench presses. Remember 40 kgs is like a solid labrador.
And my little pleasures were getting 50 pages of my book read and doing a few rows of knitting. I love knitting. It makes me feel good.
I now have to keep this up.
We had a chat about anger.
I'm reasonably mild mannered. Like everybody, I get pissed off, grumpy and irritable - but angry - really angry - that only happens every couple of years, and that is a sight to behold.
I explained that when I do get angry, it's normally done with pretty quickly and I'll either walk, scream or throw inanimate objects about. Or go for a drive and play The Pogues really loudly. That's all fine.
But the real headspace kicker was when we talked about my alleged novel, which I've not touched in months. I went over the premise of the book. I had a chat about how I related to the characters.
Ouch.
I've always known that I was a bit like Faith, my protagonist - a bit lippy, a bit street smart, rather sarcastic. But the rest of the gang - Mo and Larry and Laz.
That exercise did my head in a bit...
But it's put my head back in my novel.
I think this exercise needs a bit more time to process.
In all, not a bad session.
I'll go back again in three weeks.
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