A Tightness in my Chest

It has been week number something since I’ve been working at home, it’s really not that bad. Since I am not interacting with any of my coworkers in-person, I have had fewer social dilemmas which has been nice. And by social dilemmas I mean asking myself whether I should talk to somebody or if they expect me to have a conversation with them. #socialanxiety

But during my time at home, I have been frequently having this tightness in my chest. Not like I’m having an asthma or panic attack, but like all of the anxiety in my body is tensing up in my chest. I’ve had this happen in the past, it’s just become more frequent.

The only thing that seems to help is doing deep breathing exercises. Sometimes I will go out on my porch to do this. It’s still chilly where I live so I enjoy the cool air, it’s refreshing.

It can be stressful for me to be existing, working, attempting productivity for once in my life then I get the stress in my chest. I feel like it takes many minutes to finally relax so I feel like it’s taking away from my time doing other things.

How do I prevent this from happening? I have been doing yoga nearly every morning this month so it’s not that, hahaha. I feel everybody says, “meditate, do yoga” to fix stress. They are not the cure for everything.

My life isn’t all that stressful and my mental health has been decent this week so I’m not sure what is going on. I’m going to try to have breathing breaks each hour to see if that is helpful.

Do you feel your anxiety in your body?

In Control for a Day

As I’ve written about in previous posts, I’ve been working through a difficult bout of emotional/stress binge eating.

For the first time in weeks, today I felt in control. It was odd but also great! My mind partially wanted to dive into my bingey habits but I was able to resist them and focus on other tasks at work.

I ate a large soft pretzel as a mid-morning snack which held me over for hours. It seems that if I have something hearty and sustaining the urge to binge isn’t nearly as strong.My body and mind recognize that I’m full and I don’t need anything more.

I feel proud of myself for being in control today! I got a little snackish (a term meaning you want to eat a lot of snacks) once I got home from work. I had some control over myself so I didn’t go crazy.

Keeping up the control is going to be challenging but I hope that I can do it!

Leave me a comment about the best part of your week! I would love to hear how you all are doing 🙂

P.S. — The photo is Animal in “The Muppets Movie” from a few years ago when he’s in anger management and says, “In control.”  Here’s a video clip for reference.

Wishing I was Invisible

Do you ever feel like nothing is going your way? The universe wants to fight and it is winning.

Today I majorly fucked up at work. I had done all of the work for this idea I had to start up an Etsy shop as a fundraising effort. I hadn’t received any emails regarding any purchases being made.

Well there was one. That I found out today about an order somebody made a month ago!

I was mortified to see that this customer reached our 5 times, getting no response from me because I put in the wrong email as the contact email. So stupid of me!! She asked for a refund because it was never sent to her and she gave the shop a 1 star.

I can’t blame her for any of her actions, I would have done the same.

I’m mortified that I had this task that I gave to myself and I totally screwed it up. I let down that customer, the organization, the volunteers who made the product and my co-workers. All because I didn’t put the wrong email as the contact!

I feel like a fool.

It doesn’t help that yesterday during a meeting we were all reminded that we could be let go at any time for no reason. I’m already nervous about that so me totally messing up on our only sale makes me worry that I’ll get fired.

In this moment I wish I could be invisible.

All My Molehills Are Mountains

There is some saying somewhere about not making mountains out of molehills. I think that’s supposed to mean that we shouldn’t turn small things into big ones.

It’s this desire to be perfect that makes me so hard on myself about every little thing that I do. In my previous post about perfectionism I talk about how I want to be perfect in my character and the general things that I do each day. I don’t want to misspeak, make errors or make somebody upset with me.

The main goal is to never disappoint or upset anybody. Especially the people I care about the most, my family, boyfriend and friends.

Early this morning I heard my cat get sick (yuck) but I really didn’t want to get up to clean it. My mom ended up being the one to clean it since she’s the first up most mornings. I felt so guilty all morning that I didn’t just get up to clean it so she didn’t have one more thing on her plate today.

As a good person I should have got up! I should have been a compassionate daughter who got up to clean the throw up so she didn’t have to. It was totally selfish of me.

I was raised in the Christian faith where I had it drilled into my head that everyone else was more important than me. That doing selfish things wasn’t what Jesus would have done. That Jesus would have cleaned up the puke for Mary instead of going back to sleep.

I was taught to always be nice to people, to make others happy even if you’re not. That helping others made God happy which is what my life was supposed to revolve around.

I lost my faith in late 2012 and tried for many years to believe in Christianity again. I couldn’t do it. Now I identify as a skeptic. I’m open to the possibility that there is a greater being making the world work but I’m also open to there not being anybody out there at all.

This post is giving me a lot of insight into my own psyche. I think the perfection comes from the unattainable standards that Christianity set for me. Even in church and college (I went to a Christian university), people told me that we would never measure up to those standards but that we should try to anyway.

I think my anxiety clings on to the idea that I should serve myself last so that I can put God and others before me.  My anxiety says that any time I upset someone or act selfishly that I am a failure because it goes against how I was trained to think.

If there’s any other formerly religious people (of any religion, there’s a lot of similar teachings in a lot of them) reading this, what are your thoughts? What was your experiencing as you had to rewire your thought process after dismissing religion?

I plan to make a separate blog post detailing about losing my faith and the journey that I went through to try and find it again.