Stream of consciousness blogging is not so much writing as workshopping. Some ideas will get fleshed out later, but most of it is just rambling. ON PURPOSE. It’s not supposed to be thought of as anything but where my mind goes for the few minutes I’m sitting here. I have all kinds of thoughts, but very few actions. My thoughts limit me a lot, and that is the focus of my therapy. Why have I been so committed to sabotaging success? Part of it is that I don’t believe that these sorts of things are supposed to happen to me. I get into the rut of “I’m just a….” I am working to change that, because I am not entirely sure I’ve ever had a job that showcased my talent rather than my weaknesses.
I am very socially anxious at work. I cover it with a lot of bright and bubbly, but the truth is that I avoid people at all costs…. because obviously, I am not doing as good a job as everyone else, so why call attention to it? I berate myself for small mistakes and blow them out of proportion so that every time I see someone in authority, I go to the smallest place inside myself.
Or at least, that’s what I have been like since I was 16 and started working as a receptionist at SuperCuts. Anxiety day in and day out. Every day I’m going to get fired. Every day is one more day that I’m barely hanging on, etc. So emotionally laden that I couldn’t drop what I was thinking about to make room for something else. It was the same way when I was in school. All of my emotional problems combined to make school a hellish place from 7th grade on, because although I attended, I wasn’t really there. I had no ability to save myself, because other people needed me and they were more important. All my kid energy went to pulling an adult across the river, or at least, that’s the way it seemed to me.
Carrying all of that anxiety made me fatigued with no realization that I was dragging ass and I could do something about it… because I’d always moved like this…. perhaps because I’d been sad for longer than I would have liked to admit, and everything takes longer when you’re so in your head that the rest of the world fades away. It’s like being locked there, because you cannot own the rumination and tell it to go away. It’s a constantly running tape filled with fear and unworthiness, but luckily, mine is starting to wear down, and hopefully with friction it will snap and my whole brain will be mine again.
For now, though, people do not see my thinking as creative, because it’s much more convenient to take the fact that I was hospitalized and see the blog through that lens rather than seeing it as one narrative… sometimes impossible to do because I realize that I skip subjects a lot.
That’s because this is not a book. A book has an editor. A book has an ISBN. A book is prestigious. A book also takes at least a year, possibly two or three, to be written and edited to final copy. My words are “all over the place,” because unlike most conservative Republicans these days, I think about things and CHANGE MY MIND. I am capable of taking in and synthesizing new information so that I have different opinions on different things. If you read them in the same day, you’re going to think I’m talking out of both sides of my face.
No. That is not reality. Stream of consciousness tells me how I feel in real time, and it changes. To stay stagnant is to close your mind to the possibility of new things….
….all over the place.
Stories That Are All True 
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