I am still tired but the roof is fixed. They put the membrane over the hole and shingled it and it doesn't leak anymore as far as I can tell (it rained pretty hard after they were done and there were no more ceiling stains so it's got to be the case). Now we just need the painter to paint everything over and the gutter guy to come replace the gutter and this whole sordid business is over with. Both of those things are happening next week, but I have nothing else until Monday so I can feel free to veg out.
Normally vegging out would involve not showering every day. Story time: my hair has been thinning past a certain length considerably over the last 4-5 years (stress? medication? genes? who knows. I think it's medication AND stress) and a few days ago I got a shampoo/conditioner combo that is supposed to help that. I used it the night it arrived and on the first wash, I shit you not, my hair looked twice as thick and felt soft and nice. Every night since it's the same deal. So now I'm showering every night again. I hope I can keep this routine going.
All my life I have told myself stories. They spew rapidly into my thoughts, singular ideas exploding into catastrophe after catastrophe, playing out every possible horrible thing that can happen in a given situation, all in the span of seconds or less. I talked to my therapist about this today and his suggestion for when that happens was to do what I sometimes already do: in my mind, shout something like STOP THINKING OF THINGS THAT AREN'T HAPPENING over and over and over until I am distracted by something else. I forget often that I can do this.
It's the only solution I can see. I can't think faster than myself to stop the thoughts from happening in the first place. I can't argue with the thoughts to reason them out of my head. All I can do is stomp my mental foot and scream over the noise of them until they fade away for that moment, and in the next moment I have to do it again. And again for the rest of my life.
Do you know how exhausting it is to have to shout at myself in my own head constantly? It's not even like I'm abusing myself, it's just that I have to turn up the volume to a deafening degree to drown out the calamity thoughts. I used to reason that I was just preparing for every situation I possibly could by playing out the possible events in my head, but in reality what I'm doing is just putting stress on my body. There's a difference between anticipating what's going to happen and worrying that when you leave your house one of the huge trees nearby is going to fall and cleave it in half and crush your tiny cat to death.
That particular worry will be relieved when I remove the trees out back soon. But I have so many others, and they lurk and spring on me like the monsters in the dark that I feel staring at me when I turn off the lights for the night. To combat those intense intrusive thoughts I picture the horrible creatures sneaking up behind me and then planting a big pleasant kiss on the top of my head instead of attacking me as I walk away.
Ugh.
Sigh,
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