Super Anxiety Smackdown!

Today I worked on a Project of Shame. Not the inner kind of shame; the outer, don't-have-my-shit-together-and-have-been-irresponsible-AGAIN kind.

[Insert long, miserable aside about how I used to be a good worker bee, really I was, really. Buzz buzz, I would say over and over, all day long. Buzz buzz.]

I am that bee no longer and haven't been for some time. I am a slug. But I am a teachable slug.

E says that people in recovery need structure. I mostly hate structure. It squashes my little slug body in uncomfortable ways. But since I'm a teachable slug and E is wise in the ways of defeating addiction, I'm trying to learn from her. I took her advice and made a checklist of daily tasks. The list is written at approximately a kindergarten level, since that is approximately where I am in terms of life management. It includes references to personal hygiene, for example, and carefully timed snacks.

It also includes work. I'll just come right out at this point and say that except for maybe 30 minutes last Friday and a couple of hours near the beginning of May, I haven't done a lick of work since my sobriety date. Not that a lot was happening before then, either. Every time I've thought about my late projects and the people who haven't heard from me and the money I'm not earning, I've wanted to meld into my mother's attractive tile floor and remain inert forever. At least as a decorative feature it would be hard to fuck up as profoundly as I've fucked up my freelance career.

For most of this month I've thought of all this as pertaining mainly to shame and depression. But when I sat my ass down on Friday and did a patch of editing, I realized that I was also terrified the entire time. Pulse-racing, chest-tightening, rabbit-on-the-run terrified. So terrified, in fact, that I couldn't return to the project. At all. For days. When I saw H yesterday, doing the medical history and answering her jabillion zillion questions made me feel the same way. She caught on to that and got me to talk about it.

So, anxiety. It's helpful to know this not just to improve my view of my navel (which, if you're wondering, is damn cute in a squishy, wine-belly kind of way) but also to address the problem. Today I took E's advice about structure and combined it with H's diagnosis of major anxiety blah blah blah and implemented the checklist. It told me what to do, and when, and I did those things. Mostly. Which for me is a fucking miracle.

The checklist told me, for example, to walk the dog after breakfast. This I did. It told me to clean the kitty litter, then to shower, then to make the bed, then to start work. These things I did as well. The first thing it told me to do when starting work was to make a list of the day's work. Not all the work in the world, just the work for today. I felt panicky as I made the list. But I did make it. Then I started to do the things on it.

Ridiculous, I know. Kindergarten. But here is where I am, and here is where I have to meet myself. (In AA they call this "living life on life's terms.")

A few weeks ago I would have been drinking by 11 a.m. in response to the anxiety. I certainly wanted to today. Instead I reminded myself that the anxiety is not grounded in reality, set tiny incremental goals, talked to the dog, posted strange updates on Facebook, allowed myself brief bouts of solitaire to stave off the worst of the rising panic, told myself to breathe, and followed the checklist. By the end of the truncated workday, I had accomplished many pages of work. If I can manage the same tomorrow I can get this beast off my desk, unless of course one of the emails I haven't yet opened from last week is a cancellation of my contract. Heh. (Finding out will be on tomorrow's list...)

One day at a time? Hell no. This is fifteen minutes at a time. Speaking of which, my checklist says I am supposed to go read now. Goodnight.