Anxieties: Hopefully the First in a Series

I found a comic on tumblr recently that chronicles a lady’s struggles with an eating disorder, and I ended up frantically reading through all that was available to see what happened. It must be incredibly hard to put herself through it all again in creating the comic, and at the same time making it an interesting and compelling (and pretty!) read, but she does it. Some of the pages really resonated with me and my issues, so I thought I would try and talk about my problems here in the hopes I can be comfortable with them enough that I can convince myself to go get help.

One of the things that really sets me off is job hunting. Applying for jobs is really hard for me to do. I look at the ads and my brain just tells me that I’m not good enough for any of the jobs, getting louder and louder the more I look at them until I can’t deal with it and I have to look at something else. I know this isn’t a good thing for a person who is unemployed. Even just writing it down like this makes me feel pretty silly about having massive anxiety over this.

When I started looking for jobs after I quit my retail job I spent a day crying over the idea of writing a cover letter. Even after Ben walked me through it patiently and went back to his stuff, I sat there and cried while I applied and tried to not make any noise because I felt so stupid that I was this worked up over it. Recently the same thing happened again over a particular job I wanted to apply to but couldn’t. I cried for an evening and left the ad open in a tab to look at but it was too much for me to handle actually applying. ‘Later,” I’d say. ‘I’ll apply later. I’ll apply tomorrow.’ Then I left it too late and just closed the tab sadly in defeat.

Yesterday I applied for two jobs. I looked at maybe twenty ads and decided I wasn’t good enough/didn’t want to work for the majority of them until these two were the only ones left. Then it took me maybe half an hour to convince myself that I had nothing to lose by applying and forced myself to go through with it. I felt sick while I adjusted my cover letter template to be right, I constantly hesitated before saving things, and it took a few tries to actually press the buttons to apply. But I told myself I had to apply to jobs before I could eat lunch, so I swallowed hard, tried to ignore the voices telling me not to bother and went through with it. I had bought soup so I wasn’t going to skip lunch like I normally do (shh, don’t tell Ben I do that) and it was a way to convince myself to suck it up already.

Then I got depressed to counteract the anxiety. The voices got louder again, saying that it didn’t matter that I applied; these agencies won’t call me back. Why would they? There’s obviously someone out there more suitable for the position, anyone would be better suited for it than me. I don’t even know why I applied in the first place, it’s a pointless activity. I’m going to be unemployed for the rest of my life because I’m a failure. It was getting ridiculous after a while, so I knew I had to stop those thoughts somehow.  I watched trashy tv shows and Scout cuddled up behind me on my chair and purred until I felt better, but it still took hours to get over this. Applying for jobs takes up my whole day because of the huge build up and recovery for a five minute act. It’s ridiculous how tiring it can be.

But this is one of those things that doesn’t have an easy fix. I can be as confident as I want that I can do the job advertised, but years of telling myself I’m a useless person is too hard for me to shake off, even with someone telling me constantly for years that I am not actually a waste of space at all. The thing is that these days I know that those voices telling me those awful things aren’t real, they aren’t true, and if it wasn’t this situation that set them off they’d find something else to make me feel bad about. It’s hard to deal with, but there is a part of me that recognises that I’m being irrational. It knows that this feeling will pass, I just have to ride it out. I am learning, albeit slowly, ways to deal with it. Obviously dealing with the situation isn’t helping me get rid of those thoughts, but I guess it’s better than nothing. It’s still pretty harrowing to have to deal with these things on a daily basis, though.

So that is one of my anxieties. I have plenty more, but I’ll probably only write about them occasionally because it’s not a particularly light-hearted topic and I don’t want this place to be all depressing. But I still feel like I need to talk about these things, even if it’s just to remind myself when writing it out that they are irrational. I have trouble remembering that sometimes.