One Step At A Time
Even tho my anxiety was a crushing rush of construction in my chest today, I was still able to go through the actions to move a personal project along.
Renew Passport has been on the To Do list for months now, but it wasn’t until I woke up in a panic on Saturday night, while on vacation, 250 miles away from my October-expiring passport (and in the dead center of the weekend, when post offices are most definitely closed), that my brain decided to upgrade this To Do from “Priority” to “Fucking Urgent: Code Red”.
I had to talk my brain down from pure panic because there wasn’t much I could do about it while away from home. Though I realized I could open the application and read it. A step that I could’ve done months ago, but didn’t, because my usual “accomplish a task” modus operendi is as follows:
Name the task
Think A LOT about starting the task
Expend a lot of energy thinking about how the task will go, how I am definitely not in the mood to do the task, and how much energy the task will take (do not actually start the task)
Find myself in a magical sliver of TIME + ENERGY overlap and decide task will be accomplished this moment
Attempt to start the task
Find out the task has 37645 more moving parts to it than I thought
Feel very discouraged and frustrated with myself, walk away from task
Another hour/day/week/month, return to assess actuality of the task and make a realistic game plan
Complete part one of task (!!)
Use a combination of timers, rewards, texts with friends, and the legitimate deadline to finish the remaining parts of the task
Check task off list. Hardly feel any sense of accomplishment and/or dopamine hit is short lived
Repeat forever until I die.
But this time I was able to stay with myself. I was able to see my self-defeating pattern(s) and encourage myself to just open the application and just start filling it out (with a timer set for 15 min, it doesn’t have to all get done in one go). I set my anxiety aside (don’t worry, we’ll be right back for you) and let myself read through the entire application without skipping around or looking for a shortcut. I read the actual directions on the government website in front of me and learned all of the steps to complete this task. And then I watched a Youtube video explain it again.
With all of that information, and a resolve to not be deterred by my anxiety / perfectionism, I was able to complete the application, print it, get my photo taken, write the check, and bring it all in an envelope to the Post Office (I KNOW!) to get it mailed out (in less than 3 days!).
Now I wait any number of weeks between 6 and 12 to see if it actually gets expedited, processed and returned to me in time for my travels.
Which feels like a whole new level of managing my anxiety around something I want to accomplish.
See, I’m learning. Just some habits die hard.