Frustration has a New Name

After a lifetime of struggle across the full tapestry of emotion and relations, has the true enemy been revealed?

Depression and Anxiety have been twin dragons that have fired my existence during various seasons and I have, for the most part, been able to keep the chained in the cave where they can ponder the havoc they have loosed on me over the last 3 years. There have been moments when I could feel the heat of the fire but with the quiver of tools given me and the backing of my wife and the support of my faith I have kept them at bay.

The struggles have continued but without a name or real form so my standard state of being has been restlessness rocked to and fro by the hand of frustration. Why, despite great effort, have I still found myself in conflict with my wife and others? If I can see the problem coming, I can head it off with CBT but why do I suddenly find myself falling through the surface of what I had believed to be solid ground into a deep pit filled with murky water? The water takes the form of anger and the silt which clouds the anger can be called fear.

I can usually work out of the pit but not before the damage is done and I have tried to pull others important to me into the pit with me. Once out, I want to just move on and put the event behind me but there has to be a reckoning that turns into another fire pit of frustration because I don't know what happened or why and there is no way I can promise to keep it from happening again. It is as if lightning has struck me from out of a clear sky. No warning. Just the explosion and then nothing to give me a clue what happened.

How about when I know when my work is being reviewed? Anxiety rises up within me like magma and grabs my complete attention, focus and prevents from looking at the process with the clarity that would allow me to see that nothing serious could happen and that I really have nothing to review. I would rather stick my arm in the magma than face a performance review, much the same as I hate, hate, hate any kind of conflict with others, particularly my wife.

What about when I sit down to work and I find myself paralyzed trying to decide where to start first, before I can calm down and use tactics honed from years of practice to get started and actually have a productive day. Still, I find myself bouncing from one task to another until I finally force myself to use a task list to finish all of the tasks that need to be done.

Go ahead and take look at my workbench? Shear chaos is strewn from end to end. When I finally go down to get something done, the time it takes to organize uses the time I had to spend, to begin with.

All these years I thought it was just me and if I could only make a plan of some kind and see it through I would see progress as I have in other areas of strife that have long had a name. I was wrong. I am relieved. I am angry, I am disappointed. I am sad. I am….

Still working things out.