What is it that I desire? If only I knew. Self-reflection seems to be the craze of the age, yet although all I seem to do these days is reflect, I find myself further than ever from the answer to the only question that really matters.
Once again, I feel myself hurtling towards an inflection point, overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of thoughts I have, my brain feeling as though it is drowning. Irrational, short-sighted decisions almost immediately become par for the course, as I feel myself returning to the immediacy of the survivalist mindset that I was sure I’d left behind this time. Everything needs to be fixed right now; I need to change jobs, cut off contact with several people, stop eating to get rid of the final few kilograms I can’t seem to shift, spend a weekend in Thirsk so I have time to relax and think (surely a contradiction in terms in my case), and so on.
I have a doctor’s appointment booked for 17:15 today. They originally couldn’t offer me anything until Monday, but I went through the triage questions again and changed a few of my answers so I’d be a higher priority. It’s so pathetically silly how easily manipulatable most systems, and come to think of it, people, are. I’m probably going to get the doctor to sign me off work for a few weeks, since I can no longer see any other way through the fog that has enveloped my mind.
I’m not sure what the immediate cause is, but I have felt it worsening for several weeks now, and if you were to look at my life from an objective perspective, it’s probably not that surprising, especially considering I have a long and tedious history of mental health issues; I broke up with my boyfriend just two months ago, my Nan died one month ago, I’m under an incredible amount of pressure at work (with a boss that either cannot or will not do anything to help), and running in the background of all of this is that I feel so incredibly lonely, lost and generally quite anxious.
At the start of October, I was in love with my boyfriend and calculating our finances so we could buy a house together somewhere local as soon as possible. A few weeks later, I broke up with him, and vowed to henceforth spend a significant chunk of time by myself to figure out what I really want from life. November comes and I’m back with him, and the house buying plan is back in full swing. Then, we break up again, I’m heartbroken, and I decide I need to move to London as soon as I possibly can, to meet new people and broaden my horizons. My Nan dies not long after this, after a torturous two weeks of watching her deteriorate on end of life care, and I don’t feel anything, or if I do feel anything, I don’t recognise it or know how to process it (probably the latter). So, I throw myself into work, try to solve every problem there is, despite knowing I can’t, and immediately get burned out and begin looking for a new job. The move to London is off, and the focus is now on getting a new job and more money as soon as possible, so I can move out, the location now being unimportant. I struggle to sleep, my mind races, I begin getting overwhelmed by the tiniest of things, and when I walk my dog at night, I find myself having to resist an incredibly strong urge to throw my iPhone at a lamppost and jump in front of oncoming cars. I tell everyone I know to email me if they need me, swap my sim card into a dumb phone, and try to isolate myself from my own life. I don’t even have my iPhone on my person right now, yet as I sit drinking a coffee and writing this, I still find myself thinking about how satisfying it would be to smash it with a hammer.
Perhaps, then, now is the right time for a doctor’s appointment, not that they’ll be of any use other than to sign my sick note (it’s an admirable profession, but general practitioners know about as much about mental health as I do about vulvas). If, by the way, it seems somewhat ridiculous that I constantly berate myself for not knowing what I want from life despite being completely unable to properly understand and process my own emotions, then that is because it is.
So what do I want? Some days, I want to live in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing except walking, reading, writing and cooking, with no friends or family to think about, no job to worry about and absolutely no responsibilities. Other days, I want to move to London, throw myself into my career, climb the ladder, earn fuck tonnes of money, socialise and make new friends, fall in love, laugh, cry, scream, shout and generally just take life for everything that it is worth. Now, believe me when I say that the ease with which I alternate between these two visions is, to put it lightly, quite inconvenient, and I can feel them both with a genuine passion just hours apart sometimes.
What I (probably) really want is just for someone to love me, hold me, and tell me that everything is going to be alright and I’m going to live happily ever after, but since that seems quite unlikely, I don’t even allow myself to think it, which is, again, probably something of an issue. In fact, it is something of a recurring issue, realising that I refuse to acknowledge my own true thoughts and feelings, never mind actually speaking them out loud or, god forbid, discussing them with someone that cares about me (or, more likely, gets paid £60 an hour to do so).
Why on earth did I let myself get so worked up about work? I can’t think of anything I give less of a shit about than the success or failure of my current employer, so how did it so rapidly become the singular focus of my life? I suppose it is the point around hyper-fixation that I keep returning to, which I am hoping to address in an essay at some point in the near future, but to keep it brief, I have an idea that my mind has to have something to obsess over, otherwise it goes into meltdown mode, although it seems it does so anyway (I guess it depends if the subject I’ve chosen for my hyper-fixation is a positive or negative feature of my life). It almost seems as though if I don’t have something to obsess about, a meltdown is all but assured.
Come to think of it, maybe the whole thing is because I am autistic, and I just need to chill out a bit? No, that can’t be it. Can it? Oh fuck off will you.
Ok, I’ve googled it, and I am almost definitely experiencing an ‘autistic shutdown’, but that is far too tidy and boring an explanation, so I’m going to ignore it for now. Besides, House Tour by Sabrina Carpenter just came on, and that’s my favourite song of hers at the moment.
As I was eating my chicken baguette for lunch earlier and watching Richard Osman’s House of Games (I usually watch at least one episode a day, and that is usually whilst I’m eating lunch, which is usually a ham or chicken baguette or sandwich, because that’s my favourite), I did actually consider the fact that many of my problems might just be a result of my autism, and they’d probably be easier to handle if I just admitted that and allowed both myself and those around me to put some ‘reasonable adjustments’ in place (to use that horrid HR terminology), but again, that’s far too tidy and boring, so it can be ignored for now. I might mention it to the doctor later though. I also might not.
I feel better now for having gotten all of this out of my system, but I don’t think I’ve actually solved anything, which is annoying. It just feels like I spend my whole life going around and around in circles – I know I have autism, I know I get overwhelmed easily, I know I hyperfixate and catastrophise, I know I’m a perfectionist, I know I overthink everything, I know I struggle to process and understand my own emotions, I know I forget things really easily, yet here I am, shocked and surprised that I am currently doing all of those things and hurtling towards some sort of meltdown.
Life is still wonderful, but it really is very silly.
