Tag: shame

021b – cigarettes, shame and the anxious brain

Had a cigarette right now. Been thinking about how the last pack had lasted me more than a year. Which averaged like 2 cigarettes a month. One of my friends said that’s okay since you gotta feel French once in a while. This pack however lasted me around two months. Which averages to roughly 2 cigarettes a week. Not happy with this but I want to plan to not buy another pack unless I’m spending it with friends. Having a pack to myself definitely made it much easier for my frequency to increase. 

Wondering what feels so good about smoking. I had to resist myself from lighting another one up when one ended. I managed to, and I feel good about it. But there’s a big doer energy in me right after smoking. I feel good, I feel optimistic, I feel hopeful. I want to feel this way from other things. I want to remember that this temporary relief isn’t natural. That it’s just that – temporary relief, temporary goodness.

Was researching a little bit last night and it does look like the nicotine stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain, so it’d make sense why I’ve been craving it more often these days. Don’t know enough neurochemistry to jam on this but I’m definitely curious about what’s special about this chemical. 

I’d been feeling a lot of shame around smoking, however. I managed to separate it out into a) a worry about it becoming an addiction, b) cultural and societal shame around it. So for starters, it’s also nice to be able to smoke without feeling the shame associated with it. I feel like as long as I was feeling the shame, I was also wanting to smoke more. It’s natural to want things you can’t have, right? Once you remove the barriers to getting something, you can plainly see how much you want it. Honestly, it feels easier to let go of it once I ditch that emotion of “can’t have”.

I’m not sure how I feel about publishing something related to smoking on this blog, but since I know I’m kind of following a full-disclosure policy with stuff I write, I know if I don’t publish this, I’d be doing that out of (you guessed it) shame. So I suppose it’s worth completing this and hitting publish.

Since I gotta add around 200 words more – I was thinking about how the anxious brain is never out of thoughts. If my anxiety is cured, what will I write about? Will I still have thoughts to share? There’s definitely a part of me that has been anxious and coping with anxiety for so long that a lot of my identity has been shaped by it (even though I’ve tried hard for it to not be the case). There’s a lot of “good” sides to anxiety, being able to have very sharp focus when stressed, having a ton of foresight, “remembering” a lot? And of course I’m curious (or worried even?) about whether those “good” things will go away if I’m not feeling regularly anxious anymore. Thankfully, someone has written a nice, well-researched post about this as well. And thankfully, I don’t write or do creative work for a living, so I probably don’t have to worry about this as much as those people might have had to. I like the conclusion there, I can probably treat it as an experiment. If I never try, I’ll never know. Maybe everything is an experiment anyway. Like publishing this post.

005 – are you still heartbroken? + mental health + shame

One of the first questions that people ask you when you talk to them about (romantic) heartbreak is whether you’re still heartbroken. How do you begin to answer that? My guess is if it’s not a clear no, then it’s probably a yes. Everyone goes through this process, you stop talking to the person, you delete their digital memories, you start thinking of yourself again. First – alone, then, with new people. You keep getting triggered every time you talk to or meet people you don’t like as much and so on and so forth. You make time for friends and family, you realize you’re craving a romantic connection with someone again, and you get back on the saddle with a fresh outlook.

Then, on a random Monday you’re dragged back into the mulch again. You wonder why it’s so hard to let a person or their idea go. You attempt to rationalize things again. You tell yourself the person is just a representation of everything you’re capable of feeling for another human being. Sometimes you try to feel these feels through other means – fantasy, movies, books, intoxicating substances (ha ha), only to, once again realize, that it’s only fun when you feel it for a human being. Perhaps some people might have mastered the art of not wanting to feel these feels at all, or maybe some have mastered being satisfied in feeling this only for their own selves, but I’m sure there are enough of us who want to feel it for another human being. And there’s probably nothing wrong with that – though the amount of time and energy we would want to spend on pursuing that want would of course have to be carefully reviewed.

Every feeling creates a bunch of thoughts, every thought creates a bunch of questions. That is all okay but it becomes a problem when we keep going round and round in circles. I did some normal girl shit like distracting myself and taking a small walk around the house to resist getting sucked back into the ground. And I’m glad to announce, it worked. So I’m back here to ask myself some of these questions and attempt to answer them here. This is so I can maybe reduce them from popping up as often as they currently do. 

Am I still heartbroken? I think, no. I’m ready to move on. 

What does that mean for me? Well, I gotta reply to this one seemingly nice girl who asked me out and gave me her number a week ago. I gotta explain why anxiety and depression didn’t give me the time to respond for the whole week, and I gotta be vulnerable enough to ask her if she’s still interested. 
If she says no, I think I’ll be fine – a little disappointed but not too bothered. 

If she says yes, I’ll be glad, but I’ll also have to face some of my fears again. The fact that I don’t feel confident and uplifted enough. The fact that feelings and emotions are hard all the time and I’m afraid and wary of doing things that have the potential to make me feel something (“negative”). The fact that I feel like I might cry if I think about someone else for more than a few minutes. The fact that I never know how much to talk about anxiety and depression because people get a bit weird about it, even though I don’t feel like there’s a need to. The fact that it’s so much harder to bring this up when going on a date with someone, simply because it feels like a bigger deal to reveal that about myself in that equation.

So much shame when it comes to mental health problems, I cannot even. Where does it even come from?

Here’s some of the things that I do or have done which might give someone (or myself) the impression that I’m pretty chill and well-adjusted when it comes to dialog around mental health:

  • Most of my family and close friends know about what I’ve been dealing with.
  • The memes. the jokes. the tweets, the posts. 
  • One of my Hinge profile prompts says that a social cause I care about is mental health awareness and the destigmatization of dialog around it. 
    • This one’s going to be fun to think about, but I’m already realizing that I put this up almost 4-5 months ago but haven’t really taken much action when it comes to it, apart from, of course, being as open as I can be from time to time. 
  • People at my workplace (in my team) know about it, about the fact that I have generalized anxiety, and that I’m in therapy as well.

Then, what is it? Where’s the shame coming from? Or, what do I hope for? These might be two separate questions but the second framing makes it easier to answer at least one of them. One of things I want to be able to do is be okay with saying “I’m feeling really anxious so I think I’m going to go home” instead of “Oh, I just have a lot of work and chores to do so I think I’m going to go home”. I think this is the first time I’ve put this down in words (apart from in therapy once, and I think the solution didn’t stick), so I’m excited to attempt this again if a situation asks for it.

While I’m at it, it might be worth addressing why I don’t already do this. I think there’s two reasons – a fear of the follow-up question, and putting the other person (or people) in a spot.

What is the follow-up question I’m afraid of? Basically someone asking me why I’m feeling anxious. In all honesty, I think it bothers me when it’s not asked, and I haven’t fully resolved what answers (or truth) I’m okay with revealing when someone does ask me that. I suppose that’s probably something I might need to figure out before I attempt experimenting with this.

Ugh, emotional labor does get tiring sometimes. What a damper. The sun’s almost gone down as well, but I’ll try not to relate these two stimuli.