Hey again!

@michelle, hope you had an awesome celebration! Good food and drink can go a long way even if you can’t go out for it!

Thanks for being agreeable about being my cheerleader hah! Don’t worry I am definitely not the frilly skirt type either but we can definitely get tshirts! You are so right about the thinking-action balance which I am very much still trying to get right. But trying is the key word.

I feel I have let my anxiety get the best of me the last couple of days, but in other ways I am proud of myself. I have found myself overthinking things quite a lot in terms of our communication after the date. It’s so interesting because I recognise much of it feels the same when I was having communication anxieties when I was with my ex. I just get so anxious about communicating too much or too little, the tone of it, how the other person responds to what I say, who messages who first, how the conversation ends. And then in order to try and reduce this anxiety I create all these different ‘rules’ for myself in my mind about how I will communicate, and as predicted it just leads to more anxiety and less control! So I have been trying to instead take a step back and reconsider how I react when I feel like this, but it is so tempting to fall into the same patterns. I read somewhere that the brain loves the familiar, so it seeks that out even if the familiar is unpleasant.

Anyway the short of it is that, despite all my overthinking, we have been in touch and she has made some hints at what we could do on our next date. So there really is nothing to be concerned about; it’s just my lack of self esteem making me think that it’s not going to go anywhere, or that she will choose someone else because why would she choose me. Honestly, I feel like I did when I was a kid in these moments; scared and timid. I can travel back in my minds eye to memories that evoke exactly the same feelings from when I was very small to when I was a teenager. I just need to be able to reassure the scared and timid kid that things will be ok whatever happens and that there is no need to try and rush things or people please.

I also have been dealing with some big feelings. Today is the anniversary of a former Flatmate’s suicide and of course that always brings up all sorts of feelings. What I am proud of is that, I posted about it on social media and my ex replied saying she was sending love and thinking of me (I talked to her about it quite a lot). And though I thought about it I resisted replying or using it as an excuse to reach out to her, whereas even a couple of months ago I would have almost certainly done so and caused myself a lot of pain.  Likewise, funnily enough the “flirtatious acquaintance” I have talked about got in touch with me after about a month of no contact (about something else) and we had a brief conversation on social media but again I didn’t use it as an excuse to message her. So… some progress to celebrate!

I’ll keep trying, s’all we can do. No doubt these feelings will come up again and again, but just have to change the way I react a little  each time and soon enough feeling overwhelmed by then will happen less. I hope???!

Thanks again for your support both. Have a good weekend. Xx