Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Drive v. Hyper Drive

Okay, Jeff hit a nail on the head with this comment on a previous post:

"This is a little bit of the problem when you find "the cure" for our gift. Pre-cure, your anxiety and general psychosis would keep you going. All your crazy coping/survival mechanisms kept you at the top of your game...but it also caused burnt out. Post-cure you are like..."ok dude...I'll get to that whenever...like...ain't life beautiful...let's stop and smell the flowers." You feel much better, a bit mellower, more in control - post-cure. But now a certain edge is gone. The drive is still there but not that continual hyper-drive. The dilemma is that going back to that earlier state - pre-cure - is a bit of hell in and of itself."

Dammit dude...that's exactly the problem. It's been driving me nuts for months. I broke the spell of obsessive drive that was propelling me forward every waking moment...which is good because I initially asked for heeeeelp because I was way burnt out. But I started school and made still other commitments when I was in the grip of the "I'M GOING TO PROVE MYSELF TO MYSELF" psychosis and...well...here I am post-mellow, trying to keep up an obsessive pace in order to simply finish those commitments and get them off of my plate for good. And realizing that I can still get a shitload done without even making myself that crazy again, which makes it even harder to pull off this ridiculousness. Dammit.

So...having to return to that level of mania is...it's painful. It's really and truly horrible feeling. It makes me literally queasy just trying to gear myself up. In fact it infuses large chunks of my recent days with quease, because this is a little bit of an endurance test and I can't just take care of everything I need to take care of overnight. I need about a month...and that month is probably going to suck a wee bit.

I spent a lot of time talking to the therapist about my anxiety the other day...because it was feeling really BIG. After talking to her I realized that I've actually made a ton of progress in the past year (Ex: my personal filing, for example, equals one small bin...not 10 boxes...and I'm way stressed about that one small bin, lol, so I had to enlist an assistant, who will be coming tomorrow to polish it off for me!). So it makes sense that I'm completely freaked out by having to return to pre-sanity levels of motivation.

I guess it was a little startling to read that comment though and realize...yet again...that I'm not the only one. There's millions of us! We're everywhere!

And hey, look...treatment does help! It just becomes obvious sometimes in weird and painful ways :)

2 comments: