jay | feeling down...

Yesterday was productive, so why am I this far down? I finished the drilling paper and sent it off for review, and assembled and packed and shipped three huge duffels-worth of IP phones and a rock hammer and fleeces and Gore-tex and a tent... enough for me, as well as extras for Julie if she happens to be called-up to help cook there on Devon Island. And including little items, like gloves from

patgreene, one of

tenacious_snail's heavy shirts, or vitamin supplements from Nancy. And FedEx tracking shows that all three made it safely to Ottawa overnight, positioned to be shipped to Resolute.

I scrambled... got the paper completed and sent in... left work at 5:30pm, after being there until 3am the night before. Had had a nice lunch with

p3aches and her baby.

But was late getting to Berkeley to meet Julie. Dinner was a bit awkward, as Julie and I hadn't seen each other since March, but OK. We went to Wine and Song... it was fun to introduce Julie to my friends there. But it was running late, there was an undercurrent of stress, and finally both Julie and Les had to leave early. Julie dropped me at my car in Berkeley, then I had a tense, distant hour with Les before finally returning to W&S to pick up James there.

This morning... I feel down. Unenthusiastic about anything, a bit hung over, feeling unwanted and useless. Squabbling with Pascal by email to Edmonton, where he is now. Maybe I had too many expectations for last night... I rarely get two sweeties together under the same roof at the same time.

Off to a friend's ordination, this morning...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Do you think the undercurrent of stress was coming from you, or the meeting of the sweeties, or what?

Hard to say... it seemed to be general at the Choirloft, last night, but that just be my filtered perceptions.

J. and I had met before, and had spent the weekend together, actually, so shouldn't have been a source of stress there. However, there were LOTS of peoples schedules implicated, and things just weren't meshing well.

besides I am being really really hormonal, having some problems with the BCP, and decided after several days of highly emotional, bitchy, needy feelings and some bleeding, I might as well just declare it time for a period. So that was good self care, but it was/is icky getting to that point.

Expectations nail me everytime. Take care of yourself...~hugs!~

Thanks! (hug)

Yesterday was productive, so why am I this far down?

Probably because getting that much accomplished sets off some small subroutine in your head that says "I'll never do this much again, this well," or "Even doing this much doesn't make me a good person," or some such.

More like "I got all this accomplished, but still got two sweeties angry at me for being a half-hour late afterward, so the evening fell flat." Got a solid B, but kicking myself for missing the A...

Hey, a B is still "above average," and life isn't graded, anyway. *hugs*

Were they angry at you? What physically observed data (aka could've been videotaped) do you have of this? You seem to be very hard on yourself and may be assuming that others will be hard on you as well.

Well, at one point last night I was sitting at the Choirloft near the kitchen, and they were standing 90 degrees apart glaring down at me... And

tenacious_snail was alternately angry and crying, back at her place, for an hour or so.

With all due respect, I'm not imagining her tears or Julie's earlier unease....

joelzero's credit, rather than taking his comment as an accusation that you were misreading events as they occured, perhaps it might be read as a non-invasive attempt at normalizing the discussion -- much like asking "how do you know they had this reaction", but without the overloaded implied prying for the specific details.

um, well, you'd told me you'd be at my house at 6, our agreement is that you will call if you are going to be more than twenty minutes late, and you called me at 7:15 to verify the alarm code. By my count, that is 75 minutes late, not 30.

I know that my feelings about what it means when someone is late (that I am unimportant, that they don't care about me, that they don't respect me, and have no interest in making me happy) *are* my feelings, and not the truth, but the feelings do need to be worked through.

Last night, I believed, you learned some things about how I define "late", and when the "please call me" agreement kicks in.

(I was also having a crummy night, though, and was feeling like I was trying to meet other people's expectations, and not getting credit for the work and effort I was putting in).

My schedule with Julie was to meet her at 6:30pm. I arrived at 7pm, then waited for her to return from a walk, then called you after I couldn't remember the code. So I saw myself as a half-hour late.

You had said that you'd be gone by 6:30pm, headed to San Leandro. I then said that I planned to try to leave work early, and could possibly get there by 6-6:15pm in time to give you a hug in passing. That did not happen, but I did not see it as a scheduled event (more of a target of opportunity). And I was not able to leave work early.

What I have learned is to not mention possible brief interactions with you unless I'm *really* sure they *will* happen, and not subject to work or traffic. Generally, work issues will trump relationship issues for me.

And if I'm not really sure when I will be arriving somewhere that you will be, even a third-party social event, I have learned that I need to give as vague an answer as I can, avoiding any ETAs unless I'm really sure I can be there *before* that time. Otherwise, if I give my ETA at some party as 9 and am actually there at 9:30, I'm in trouble even if it isn't your party.

Jay, it isn't about whether or not you are there when you say you will be, it is about whether or not you call.

Avoiding giving me ETAs is still going to feed my sense of fear and anxiety, because I don't know what to expect. I want to know what to expect, and to be told when it changes. The change is fine, it is the uncertainty that I have difficulty with. I may learn why, and I may change, but right now, this is how I am.

Then it becomes a problem of expectation management... I'm really resistant to updating expectations as I go along, because my experience is that it is better to be yelled-at once at the end, than repeatedly with each update. My optimal strategy has been to set expectations so loosely that I won't have to communicate any updates.

I sometimes think you may overbook and overschedule yourself because you have a core belief that relates to success, failure, and who you are. I don't know *what* the core belief is, just I have some sense that you aren't comfortable being a 100% success, so you add enough things to your schedule that you're likely to have some level of "failure" someplace, and that this somehow meets some need of yours, and fulfills your "story" of what your life is supposed to be like.

(feel free to examine my perceptions, and discard them if they don't seem to fit)

No. Sigh. (shakes head)

I overbook and overschedule because I'm ambitious, I want to get as much done as possible and not have much downtime, and because people keep asking me for things and I hate to say "no". So I try to do everything, and I think I actually do amazingly well at covering it all without being any further behind than I usually am.

You "over" book and "over" schedule. and you "cover" it well.

Is this really how you want your life to be?
Why not do only 10 things rather than 20? Does doing more mean something? Is it better to do 10 things amazingly well than to have "covered" all 20?
Can you be ambitious and avoid all the rushing and scrambling and stressing? How can downtime actually help you get more accomplished?

So far it still beats having to either settle, becoming a flake and dropping things, or having to say no...

what you wrote does sound exactly like the man that I love. *smooch*.

Lots of hugs.I am sorry if our lunch made you late.T

feeling down...

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Lots of hugs