Good morning, I was thinking similarly last night as well. I was thinking it would be a good idea to put all of this into a book. However, then I laughed to myself. The majority of times when I speak to you I am doing it via voice text. Because I am on my phone, given my job and when I am traveling, I am 90% away from my computer. Therefore I utilize voice text a lot, but that is why my punctuation and certain words are not always written correctly! Therefore if I do want to write this down for printing, I should get back to the computer! I am just joking!

As I was making the post to you last night I noticed that there was a beginning, middle, and End. In the beginning it was more self focused, what happened to me today? Then in the middle it reflected back onto the root of this behavior, it went away from the actual incident itself and focused on the root of the discomfort and feeling. Lastly the root of the issue was tied in with future goals, the internal distress was identified as a trigger, subconscious roadblock, and then a new perspective was formed. I find that a lot of the reading I have been doing in the past was written this way. How interesting that even my post is modeled this way now, a structured through process! without me even realizing, without me even trying to make it didactic. That shows good progress to me, and it was as natural as could be!

I think of anxiety as a frenzy, a large swarm of bees buzzing around the brain, they buzz, and buzz, and buzz, they get louder and they cause you to feel even more uncomfortable, and at some point even make you scream. Or worse – feel you have to learn to live with it….

However, you can’t just tell these harmful bees to go away, why would they? I have found that the focus on the bees swarming around isn’t really the key, it is: what really attracted them to you anyway? Is there honey somewhere in your vicinity? What is it that brought bee number one to you and then subsequently bee number two and then bee number 100? What is that honey? Where is it? How did it get there? If I identify the honey, I can understand what made the bees attracted to me.

I find that if I utilize this concept to dissect normal situations I can be more strategic. For example the incident with my friend at brunch, I left it feeling uneasy, like I mentioned it wasn’t uneasy about the actual conversation that was had, it was just an overall uneasy feeling. That is often harder to understand and wrap your brain around because it is a vague feeling and not acutely attached to a certain comment, or incident. However as time went on I realized that there was some honey that I had that attracted a bee. My honey in this situation was my feeling that I had to enter and fit into the same cookie mold that my friend was residing in. Not because I felt that cookie mold was great, or better, or even attractive, but I felt that this would make the situation more comfortable. She was stating her views and living in her cookie mold, that she has been in her whole life and that she will continue to be in. I perhaps shared that mode with her at a few points in my life such as when I was 14 or 15 years old. However after that I have never really lived in that cooking mode nor did I want to. The entire conversation at brunchFelt like her bringing me to the cookie mode and saying OK now get in there and fit in, you haven’t sat in there for so long try it out. And I am contorting my body into this way and that trying to get into that mode, stretching and pulling. However at the end of it, I say not only do I not fit into the small, this mall doesn’t very comfortable, and in fact I really just don’t like it. You could enjoy your cookie mauled however I’ll go down the street and find something else perhaps a fun flexible waffle maker! The reason that bumblebees even swarmed in my head after that incident is because I was holding onto this concept that I have to as before accommodate those that may not understand me. Innoway I thought that I had to stoop down to her level of the cookie mode and hi to also make it comfortable for her by sitting alongside and the same one. When I realize that this was the concept that I was holding onto I realize that this is where the anxiety would be attracted to. Without that concept being present there was no place for the anxiety too attached to, the bumblebees didn’t really find a place to really settle in on my brain because the honey was gone.

I am glad to be able to identify this. Waking up today looking back at yesterday, I smiled. This is not because I am being phony, this is not because I am trying to force myself to think about it as a positive, no, in fact I felt that I thought of it almost as a distant memory, already. I thought of it as a learning point that I would write in a book, not an incident that happened during a week away that ruined my experience.A story that I laugh about and tell friends, not an acute event that has actively disturbed my mental state. I found that this was similar when I talked to my first friend about why I stopped talking to my parents. I wrote to you about this about two weeks ago, I mentioned the same thing to you. It was as though I was flipping back in my autobiography and reading a few pages behind. I was reciting those pages to her to catch her up to speed. I was not acutely feeling them, I was not acutely disturbed by them, nope, I was just referencing the beginning of the chapter because she had not read it.

I find this to be different than what they call dissociating from feelings or being numb. As you know in the past I have definitely felt numb about things, and you helped me realize that staying in the negative cycle was accommodating numbness. I do not feel Numb about things anymore- it’s more that certain things just not bother me as much. Certain things are not so saturated with emotion and feeling anymore. I know that this will be ongoing, something will bother me, I will go through my tactics of trying to dissect it, and then at some point it will no longer bother me. I guess life is a cycle full of this, but I no longer think of that as a depressing and exhaustive cycle. In the past I would find this quite depressing, I would think to myself: so what, is everything always going to be a struggle? You get upset about something then you deal with it, and then you get upset again, this is such a vicious cycle- how tiring! In the past I would find this quite depressing, I do not think this way anymore. However I also do not think that life is peaches and roses and a perfectly straight line. I now feel that having coping mechanisms, and dealing with the things that life throws at you does not always have to be such an exhaustive practice. When you’re riding a bike each little rock that you go over isn’t going to knock you off your bike so you fall down and have to get up and start all over again. Nope, each Little Rock or crack in the road will just cause you to go right and left for a little bit. Perhaps that will add .2 miles onto your journey, so what. Perhaps it will make you pause at an intersection, so what. Perhaps it will make you veer to the right and end up at the lake. How wonderful. That is great you can now sit back, Sink and Savor! enjoy this Lakeview for five minutes, something you would not have come across. You would not have come across this if you didn’t have the small rock in your path. Now, you were able to have a positive experience that was unexpected, and you learn something. This is how I think of it. Of course This may not apply to large challenges in life including major issues, health, personal, career related etc. However if our bike is used to veering slightly to the right and left, pausing, accepting new paths and detours, then the bike is stable and strong enough to go up mountains and valleys as well. In due time.