Abnormal psychology

I've written here about my struggles with depression and disordered eating, but not so much about my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. They've died down a bit since I went on Lexapro more than a year ago, but I still find myself battling irrational cause-effect relationships in my mind. It's not "If I lend this camera to my friend for the night, he'll break it," but instead: "If I lend this camera to my friend for the night, I'll be unable to stop worrying about whether he'll break it and thus my work will suffer." It's a step removed from actually not trusting the friend.

It's not (usually) that I'm an ungenerous person, it's that I let my neurosis hijack my behavior and prevent me from being as giving as I want to be. (And yes, I'm the one letting this happen. I'm getting better at fighting what I call "pre-worry" or "meta-worry" -- worrying compulsively that I'll worry -- but I still have a ways to go.) Sometimes it's hard for me to separate my mind's obsessive-compulsive "reasoning" from valid logic or meaningful emotion. It's the same problem I've long had with ambient noise, a big pet peeve of mine.

Sometimes I have reason to complain about noise (i.e., a "normal" person would), while at other times I'm unusually sensitive to unwanted sounds (a "normal" person wouldn't be upset, but I am). Figuring out the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable discomfort remains tricky for me, though again, I'm improving. Using earplugs, which I began doing when I moved to the Kibbutz in August of 2008, has been a minor revelation. How did I survive without them all those years? How much tension could they have relieved when I was in high school and college?

I don't have a lot more to say about this at the moment, except that I've gotten better at making decisions, and not whipping myself into a total neurotic lather in the process, since starting therapy in late 2005. I'm grateful to have somewhere to go each week -- or every couple weeks, now that I'm in a money crunch -- where I can decompress, talk through my issues du jour, and realize how much stress I carry around. I still prescribe exercise and meditation for my problems, but I'm having a devil of a time getting myself to fill the prescription.

Out with the old, in with the new

This past Sunday night, I attended my weekly Buddhist meditation group and participated, after our usual 45-minute sit, in a ritual to mark the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. We all wrote down things we wanted to let go of from the past year and burned the scraps of paper in a fire (in a cast-iron pan, while the owner of the house looked on nervously), then made a list of what we wanted 2009 to be about. Most people only talked about one or two of their things to let go of and things to strive for, and some didn't talk about them at all. It was a subtle and communal way of making what are normally called New Year's resolutions, and I felt for the first time that I might be able to let these statements guide me, at least a little, in the coming year.

The main thing I burned and desire to let go of is anger -- at myself and at other people, for things that seem important and things that I know not to be. What I want 2009 to be about: fitness and exercise, an area I've long struggled with (I'd add nutrition to the mix, while I'm at it), and setting and working towards goals, including my plan to go back to school (perhaps for an MFA in creative writing). Both lists included other items (self-centeredness and shelteredness on the first one; deepening community ties and doing good work on the second), but anger, fitness, and goal-setting are the "headlines," the main things I want to work on. I hope that all of us see better things in the year to come, in our own lives, in the lives of those we love, and in the troubled world that surrounds us. I hope we see at least some of the change we need.