Tag Archives: anxiety

Nov 27 2012

30 Things to do before I’m 30

Posted on by

This blog post has been in the works for quite a while (about 4 months). I’ve come close to posting it so many times and at the last moment, talked myself out of it again. Last week some friends on Twitter were talking about the 101 in 1001 lists thingy and I decided that it was time to post this. It’s still taken me another week to overcome inertia, so I’m posting it now before I give myself the opportunity to back out again. Apologies for any typos, I’m just sick of reading this over and over and then deciding not to post it. This is a long one btw, so grab a cup of tea and pull up a chair… Jo.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been a little internet-absent recently. Normally when this happens I come back with some blog post or other plagued with apologies and excuses. This time it’s different (and no, it’s not because I had to go to rehab following my Snickers addiction).

A few months ago I realised that I am now, officially, in my late twenties. I am 28 and a half (ish) years old. That means that in a year and half (ish) I’m going to be 30. I know that’s not an overly distressing thing in itself, but it prompted me to think about my twenties and wonder what, if anything, I have been doing with my life so far.

I started to think about the things I have done, but mostly, I thought about all the things I haven’t and I wondered why that might be.

Let’s go back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old. At this point in my life all of my friends had birthday parties at a place called The Big Buddy Bear Club which was a massive play area (ball pools, slides, tunnels, rope ladders etc.). The Big Buddy Bear Club was the place to have birthday parties. It was excessively good fun, for most kids.

I’m sure that given the amount of times I actually went to The Big Buddy Bear Club I probably had fun at least once, but all I remember is that I once got stuck in a tunnel and I found it very scary and upsetting.

I was crawling through a tunnel which had a gap in it. To cross the gap, I had to crawl across a rope bridge. As I approached the rope bridge I stopped. I wasn’t keen on crossing the rope bridge – it just didn’t feel safe. My gut instinct told me to go back the way I came, but there were kids behind me and I was too shy/scared/socially awkward to ask if I could crawl past them so I closed my eyes and hurriedly crawled across the bridge before pulling into a side tunnel and bursting into tears.

Even though I didn’t fall, and the rope bridge didn’t disappear beneath me, and nothing bad happened at all, I couldn’t bring myself to continue further down the tunnel. And I couldn’t bring myself to go back across the rope bridge, either. Supposedly, facing your fears means you overcome them. For me, it merely confirmed that I definitely found crawling across a rope bridge incredibly scary and that I didn’t want to do it again.

And so I sat there in the tunnel and cried. I cried about being too scared to go forwards and too scared to go backwards. All because of a totally non-threatening rope bridge especially designed for children of my age, height and weight to crawl across.

As I sat there sobbing loads of other kids crawled by. Some would give me a quizzical look before going on their way, others didn’t notice me.  Once again, being incredibly shy, I was too scared to ask one of them to help me get out of the tunnel. So I just sat there and all I could think about was how everyone in The Big Buddy Bear Club was having masses of fun except me. And maybe some other kid who was throwing up in the ball pool or something.

Eventually, after I can’t even remember how long, some girl I didn’t know saw me crying and helped me back across the rope bridge and back to where lot’s of extremely bored-looking parents were sitting on a bench drinking coffee and waiting for the party to be over. I sat with the bored parents until the end of the party, watching all the other kids playing and having ridiculous amounts of fun. I wanted to go back, but I told myself not to. It just wasn’t worth it, what if I got stuck somewhere else? What if next time, no one found me and I’d just get left there?

This is pretty much the story of my life. I’m scared of everything. When I face something I find scary I don’t conquer my fear, I simply reinforce the fact that, yes, I really do find that thing scary.

This is, apparently, how I roll. I seem to fear things I’m perfectly capable of doing, just in case something terrible happens. And so I sit on the side, crying, too scared to go forwards and hoping that, eventually, someone much more confident than I am will find me and I can go home.

Whenever I have taken ‘risks’ (and I mean that in the broadest possible sense of the term) I feel like things work out badly, and I regret taking that risk… And then that puts me off ever taking any other sort of risk or impulsive action ever again… Ever.

So now I ring-fence myself into ‘playing it safe’ that is: avoiding all the things that scare me, not making any decisions, and hoping that maybe one day everything will just work out for the best and I’ll be happy. I stop myself from making any decisions just in case I make a bad one that might make me unhappy.

So here I am. Nearly 30 and well and truly fenced into my comfort zone. This doesn’t result in a particularly satisfying life.

When I started thinking about what I have done this past decade, I realised that I’ve moved house more times than I care to remember, eaten a lot of pizza and watched a lot of films. I also passed my driving test, but I’m too scared to actually drive a car. And I wrote a novel… with no story.

I’ve realised that a combination of life anxiety and an unrelenting fear of failure has left me in this situation. I can either shrug my shoulders to it all and say that this is just the way I am, or I could do something (even if it’s a fairly small thing) to change.

In the interests of turning 30 and knowing that I’m heading in the right direction (or at the very least, be safe in the knowledge that I did more than move house and eat pizza) I’ve decided to make a change.

I started making a list of things I wanted to do before I’m 30. It’s kind of like a bucket list – minus  the  swimming-with-dolphins cliché and having death as the deadline. There are only 30 things on my list, but some of them might take me a while to complete. Others are small things that I’ve wanted to do for while but never got around to doing them – or simply because it’s easier not to bother.

I’m sharing this with you, Internet, to force myself to actually do the things on this list instead of flaking out like I normally do.

And I figured that since I’m sharing my list with the internet, I may as well write about each of them here. I foresee most of these things going spectacularly wrong (all part of the fun/learning curve, right?), and I’m more than happy to share those experiences for your amusement (you’re welcome).

Still reading? Excellent. Without further ado, here’s the list:

30 before 30 – The List

1. Join the Anthony Nolan register.

2. Have something (anything) published and be paid for it.

3. Begin to pay off my student debt.

4. Do volunteer work.

5. Be a confident driver (i.e. not have a panic attack when facing the prospect of getting in the car).

6. Write a new novel and complete my MA.

7. Learn how to play chess.

8. Take a yoga or meditation class.

9. Eat lobster.

10. Go ice-skating/sledging.

11. Learn a bit of Spanish.

12. Host a dinner party.

13. Walk the Three Peaks.

14. Try out for a roller derby

15. Have a party with a bouncy castle.

16. Master using WordPress

17. Go to a music festival.

18. Watch the films I haven’t watched (list to follow).

19. Go out for brunch.

20. Go to a drive-in movie.

21. Visit Edinburgh.

22. Do all the touristy bits of London you’re supposed to do when you’re a tourist.

23. Do a pub crawl.

24. Knit a scarf.

25. Do all the things I was too scared to do as a child (list to follow).

26. Own a round wicker chair.

27. Be a vegetarian for a week (or maybe a month).

28. Go on a random trip without planning any of it.

29. Stay up for 24 hours.

30. Work in the field for which I received my degree.

There’s a reason for why each of these things went onto the list, but I’ll explain each when I blog about them (because otherwise, this is going to be the longest blog post ever).

Apr 23 2012

How Compliments Make Me Feel Awkward (and how I keep thinking my brain operates like Windows)…

Posted on by

This isn’t a real post, it’s half a post. It’s another one I redrafted several times, but I kept lapsing into serious rants about self-image. In short, this is really just a follow-up to the previous post, about getting a compliment during a note passing incident with a strange man, and feeling very anxious about a post I had written (about me feeling anxious about writing).

Firstly, I can’t cope with compliments. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t really know how to react. My brain gets a Windows error. Then I freeze up. Then this happens:

It’s really hard being me. And having a brain that runs on Windows XP.

I also said, y’know, that no one had ever said… that  particular thing to me before. Which, wasn’t strictly true. My point was, it sounded completely alien. Seriously, like klingon or something. It’s not a word I would use to describe myself… I mean, not that many people would (except maybe narcissists. And Christina Aguilera), but in my case it really clashes with my haphazard personality. I spend my days sitting at my desk in joggers or lurking in coffee shops wearing ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors with gaping holes in them. This reality makes compliments like that hard to take. Also, I have an extensive catalogue of disparaging comments that stretches waaaaay back into those dark days of ‘high school’, which contribute to my general deflection of compliments.

I’m beginning to wonder if insults stock-pile in the psyche. Maybe they’re like a worm virus: one negative comment sinks in, replicates itself and then forwards itself to… everyone in your address book… (Okay, maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through properly). What I’m trying to say is, maybe the damage control of negative comments is difficult to manage – much like that of a worm virus. You think you’ve sorted the problem and then months later, it will reappear and wreak havoc all over again and you become super-infected by negativity. Unless, of course, your psyche runs on Mac OS X.

In which case, my psyche got infected during my teens. Puberty wasn’t kind to me. My nose went from being one of those cute-button-noses to looking like it was broken (but it wasn’t). In addition, I had goofy teeth and it was only when puberty hit that I got landed with the hellish years of orthodontic treatment. My skin mutated into hideousness and my eyebrows, for some reason, grew seriously out of control (they rivalled Madonna’s in the 80s). In a time before GHD straighteners, my hair transformed from long, blonde adorableness to a frizz-tastic, static nightmare, which seemed to take on a life of its own – reaching forth from my head and attaching itself to the polyester v-neck jumpers worn by everybody in the school. On top of this uncomfortable set of changes, I was at an age where suddenly fashion and style were important. And I didn’t have a clue about either (I still don’t).

Here’s a run-down of a few high school incidents that readily spring to mind:

  • One day, a popular girl marched up to me (popular entourage in tow) and asked me HOW ON EARTH I could wear blue socks with black shoes. I was stumped for a response, mainly because I hadn’t even realised the error of my ways. Looking down at my shoes,  I flushed with red trying to think of something to say. Eventually, I uttered: ‘It’s a free country…’ a popular response in the mid-nineties as it was applicable to almost anything. Sadly, its applicability did not stop it from being super-lame. The girl snarled and stomped away with a herd of her fashioncentric friends, as if my mismatching socks and shoes had somehow been a personal attack on her.

 

  • Once, during an English class, we had to play a description game, where someone had to guess which person in the class was being described to them. My classmates described me as: ‘She’s got blonde hair, and big teeth’. Bingo. The boy who was guessing (who I also happened to have a pretty big crush on, at the time) instantly pointed (that’s right pointed, without actually saying anything) at the girl in the back corner. Me. Blondie big teeth.

 

  • In a drama class, we had to improvise an argument with another person. My drama teacher reiterated (several times) that the argument was to be purely fictitious and we were not to make personal digs at each other. My partner shrugged at me and murmured: ‘You got a big nose’. AND THEN DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ELSE.

 

  • A boy I was going out with, broke up with me because every time he saw me, it made him feel physically sick. (True story).

It’s a fact of life that high school is hell for the under-confident.  I think the fourteen-year-old me is the one who hears compliments, and they’re just so hard to believe in and amongst the hundreds of big nose/big hair/big teeth insults. I feel like I’m being lied to. This is partially due to my school days, but mainly down to watching way too many American high school movies in which the “unattractive” girl is dated by a cool jock in order to win a bet.

For the record, I still don’t understand fashion. And sometimes I still wear inappropriately coloured socks with black shoes. Sometimes I wear socks that don’t even match each other. With holes in them (take that, girl from high school!). Sometimes, I’ll get up and I won’t even change out of my pyjamas – which are fleecy and pink and covered in little cakes. Sure, you can call me beautiful but you haven’t seen me eat cold, leftover bolognaise direct from the fridge. At four in the afternoon. Wearing fleecy pink cake pyjamas. Using only my hands (take that, boy I used to go out with!).

This post doesn’t really have any sort of conclusion. Except that high school was hell, and compliments make me uncomfortable.  But I think I said that at the beginning.

So, moving on… Here’s a little follow up about my anxious feelings of writerliness (that’s totally a word). A few things have happened over this past week to settle the nerves. One of them was watching Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity, which I found kind of beautiful (take that, compliment guy with red biro!) and inspiring.

Anyway, next time, a proper post. Promise.

Feb 18 2012

Why my attempts at being confident make me feel like a knobhead

Posted on by

I’ve become convinced that my crippling lack of confidence is becoming a bit of a hindrance.  You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve been told to be more confident (at least 9000 times a day). It’s something that has plagued me forever. Even as a kid, my school reports all said the same thing ‘needs more confidence’ as though they had been rubber stamped by every teacher, for every subject, for every year until I left. I’m now almost convinced that if I was more confident, I might kick-ass (but probably not).

Compared to how I used to be, I think I am pretty confident these days. At one point I was too scared to go out for a meal or drink in a bar, because the prospect of actually having to order food or drink from another person was completely terrifying. In the past few years there have been various little confidence hurdles I’ve (somehow) managed to get over, but others are a little trickier. What’s frustrating, is the way that people tell me to ‘just be more confident’ as if a) I’d never realised that before and b) there’s some kind of switch inside that just needs flicking on – releasing some kind of previously untapped super-confidence resource that’s just been lying dormant until now. I don’t think that switch exists, or if it does, it’s faulty and I keep flicking it on and off out of boredom. I don’t know how to be more confident and (hand on heart) I have tried.

The thing is, whenever I attempt to be more confident, I get stuck in an endless loop, because I hate cocky, over-confident knobheads. While I want to be confident, I don’t want to be a knobhead, and  it is a scientific fact that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance:

super fine line

My problem (as with everything) is I try too hard. Whenever I attempt to be confident, I accidentally launch myself over that fine line, and end up talking like a cocky-know-it-all. Afterwards, I tend to despise myself for being a knobhead and thus, remind myself why it’s much better to just keep quiet and not speak at all. But then, not speaking at all reverts me back to my coy little ways, which in turn makes me feel like I’m missing out… It’s a vicious cycle. No. Really – here’s a diagram to prove the theory:

vicious cycle

A perfect example of a vicious cycle – it’s super vicious. You just have to imagine it having really sharp teeth.

So, anyway, vicious cycle, endless loop whatever you want to call it – I can’t escape it. I’m pretty sure most other people manage to go through their daily lives without lurching from crippling shyness to cocky-knobheadedness, and if you are one of those people, then I feel I desperately need to know your secret. My question is: how do you become confident without becoming a knobhead?

PS. I’m not sure how you spell knobhead. ‘Knobhead’ and ‘nobhead’ are apparently both acceptable. I think.