It�s Monday morning and I have been busy since I arrived at work. It was a busy weekend and I needed to attend to the system and troubleshoot a pH problem (the meter or probe is bad). Things have slowed down a bit and I am on lunch.

I woke this morning several times after my Darling left (his training schedule gets him up before the sun and I have an additional hour and a half of sleep after he leaves.) I wake when he gets up and then I am semi-conscious as he readies usually falling back to sleep after he is gone. This morning I had several nightmares in the short time between when he leaves and when I get up. In one dream I was laying in bed, presumably in the morning prior to getting up for work, reading a magazine when the door opens and it is him, back again telling me he was let go again. The other two (I think there were two more, maybe three) I don�t remember specifically just that I woke up distressed. If I were a superstitious person I might think something bad was about to happen but I am not superstitious so I believe that my fears are creeping up on me again.

I have often described myself as a pessimist. Strangely, those that know me consider me an optimist because my deceitfully upbeat personality. Even the Shrink had trouble seeing the depression because, like many a comedian, I am full of humor when I feel the worst. Laughter distracts me from my prison.

As a pessimist I am always expecting the worst. Even when things are going well my temptation (and the behavior I must be wary of) is to sit expectantly waiting for the storm. Good times are always by definition the calm before the inevitable storm in my perception. Since life rarely tools along in wonderfulness for very long I am generally rewarded with some sort of crisis. I am trying, however, to change that behavior.

Yes, the rain will eventually come, it always does, even in Southern California, but I don�t need to waste the sunny days. It�s not like I can prepare for the lightning bolt of the Gods. Even if I could see it coming what could I do? I would be as Cassandra, cursed to know the future but never believed.

I have spun so many futures for myself, allowing my mind to reach out and fabricate imagined meetings between myself and my ex, different job scenarios, strange turns in my current relationship, and even imagined events from the past (arguments I never had but would have liked to have had my say.) Some of the time is well spent I think, sometimes I need to run the play in my head so that I can let go of an emotional attachment. By allowing the imagined interchange I give myself release, as long as I don�t confuse the imagined with the real I believe this is as valid as role playing in therapy.

But running my play into the future is a waste of time and energy that could be spent enjoying the present. It is not as if I have ever accurately predicted the future. Nothing ever seems to turn out as I expected good or bad, I am always unprepared beyond the general acknowledgement that stuff happens and so it goes.

I wrote a poem a while ago that I believe describes this cycle for me.

The biggest problem is that it is so very difficult (perhaps impossible but I haven�t given up yet) to slow the racing thoughts and they take you far and wide in such a short time that you become jammed. If you add the real world into the mix you get psychic overload. Too much input. This manifests itself as an overwhelming desire to shut out the world because your thoughts alone are more than you can handle without placing more demands on an already overtaxed system.

The brain is always racing even when you can�t drag yourself through the days. You feel as though you are moving through mud but your mind just won�t stop. And the voices in your head are always there to criticize and belittle. They point out your flaws and fill your mind with �what if�s� and �if you had only�s� and they leave no room for the only things in your life that live for, that you love.

My ex had a voice in his head that was very critical of him and I think it sounded a lot like me. I never said the things he claimed I did but I believe he heard them just the same. He lived a lie to be with me and it must have been truly exhausting for him. Now he doesn�t have so much to live up to so perhaps he won�t here my voice anymore, I rarely hear his.

I think everyone has voices in their head. Some of them sound like our parents, some like childhood bullies, and some are just our fears tapping. We often get angry or feel bad about what we �think� someone else thinks of us, completely without proof or validation. Sometimes we even get mad at the person for thinking such things regardless of the fact that we have no idea what they think. What a damning cycle.

Why can some folks ignore the voices and others are crippled? If you figure that out please let me know, I, for one, would love to find a cure.

The good news (I always seem to find good news, strange from a self proclaimed pessimist don�t you think?) is that most of the time when people are mean to you it has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with the voices in their head. With that in mind it is easier to suffer the slings and arrows because physics tells us that any action creates and equal and opposite reaction.

Think of it as Scientific Karma.

I wish you Peace

~alison~

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