Anxiety is an Asshole

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 I’ve been enjoying my new job though it still feels bizarre to be somewhere new. I had gotten so comfortable at Scholastic. I felt like a veteran of Scholastic for all that I’d only been there four years. I still talk like I work there when I talk about it which makes sense. I mean I’ve been working at the library for all of three days, so I probably need to cut myself some slack on these things. I’m still afraid that I’m a fraud and that everything is going to come crashing down in a couple of weeks and everyone is going to see that I was an awful choice. I don’t know why I feel that way. When I think about all my past experience and the types of things I’ve done and the types of things I’ve worked on and the things I’m good at, I can’t imagine a job that would be better for me. I can’t imagine a job that would better encompass the things I care about and want to be involved in. 

Maybe it’s because it’s taken so many years to get this far. Maybe it’s because I’d settled into Scholastic and that I had begun to feel like I really would be there forever, or at least for fifteen years or something. Maybe I just miss Emily. Or maybe I’m an incredibly anxious child who doesn’t know how to believe in herself the way other people seem to believe in me. I don’t know. I wish I did. I feel like if I knew exactly what the issue was that I could find ways to fight it. I’m pretty sure that there’s something in “The Art of War” about knowing your enemy or whatever. Sometimes I feel like my own my mind is my enemy and that’s a frustrating thing. I don’t want to fight my own mind. I don’t want to be split, and I don’t want to be anxious. I want to be okay. I want to be me and myself against whatever comes my way. 

Sometimes I do feel like two people, not in the multiple personality disorder kind of way, just in there are a lot of opposing thoughts, opinions, intentions, and actions in my head. I’m guessing most people feel that way, in one way or another. At least I hope that’s normal-ish. I’m better than I was for sure, but I still struggle. 

It’s weird because I went after this job with the surety and confidence and the tenacity of a bulldog and with the belief that they should and would hire me. And now that I have the job, I keep feeling like they’re going to tell me there’s been a mistake or something. 

I guess anything that you work your ass off for 10 years to try to get that you suddenly get is going to feel a little unreal and a little like there’s been a mistake. I am going to be good at this job. I’m already good at parts of the job. Yes, I have a lot to learn and practice. Yes, there will be lots of challenges to handle. Yes, there will be parts of the job I don’t like. Yes, there will be difficult people and situations to handle. At the same time, I have built a damn near perfect toolbox of experiences and knowledge for this adventure and I should have confidence in those things and in myself and in the fact that there’s no way they would’ve given me this job if they didn’t have a great deal of confidence that I could do it. 

Since my first moment walking into starting this job, people have been expressing their surprise in the fact that I wasn’t working in another position in one of the other branches part-time before they hired me for this position. I keep getting this sort of slack-mouthed, wide-eyed expression when I say “I am brand new to the system.” One person said something like “That’s really rare, they almost always promote from within for that position.” 

I must have rocked the shit out of that interview.

You know, even I, with all my anxieties and insecurities really did think I did an overall good job with that interview. I need to have some faith in myself honestly. I am working on that. 

I wanted to write last night, but I was so tired. I keep thinking that life is going to settle down and I’m going to have more time to write, but that keeps not being the case. I’ve been so happy with about everything that life has been bringing my way, but I can also feel that I’m tried and fraying a little at the edges which sucks. I could really use a quiet few days off. I am going to get a three day weekend next weekend (all being well), but I have to make it through a week of madness first. And you’re probably thinking, “Kate, tomorrow is Thursday. You’ll have a weekend off, and then you only have to work four days until your three day weekend.” Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. I am off Saturday, but then I’m working Sunday through Thursday. Which is fine, but at the same time, my friend Ju’Leia is coming to visit this weekend and staying at my house. And Jaymie is staying with her parents, but she’s going to be in town starting tomorrow and I don’t know how well putting them together would go, so I’m trying to see them both. 

I’m going to be working so much of the rest of her visit, I really want to make the most of Saturday, but I just don’t know how I’m going to make it through all this craziness. If there is anything I know about me, it’s that I am really good at “just getting through” until I can get a break but I worry about myself long-term with the new job. If I were still at Scholastic I would just be using PTO to take a break and a mental health day or two but while I will earn both PTO and sick leave at the new job, it’ll be a while before I have enough of either of those things to use them and I worry that I’m going to be burned out before I can get a chance to build those up enough to use them. 

Hopefully, this next week won’t be quite the challenge I’m fearing it will be and that next weekend I’ll be able to actually reset and recovery in a way that I really have not been able to do the last couple of weekends. Not that the last couple of weekends didn’t have great points because they did! I’m right in the middle of the introvert/extrovert scale, so I’ve been super enjoying myself and now I’m reaching the limit of my extraversion. 

Either way, I need to pass out. I need to shower in the morning, and I have to rest as much as possible over the next week, which sucks for my writing habit this month, but oh well. All I can do is all I can do.