Today, I get Personal

My phone vibrated.

I pulled it out to see what it was. My housemate, Micah, had sent a group message to me and our other housemates. When I read the message, I almost threw my phone across the room.

Oh, how freeing that must feel.

Micah: “Hey Compadres! I was thinking we all should have a house meeting 🙂 sometime maybe this next week/end.”

I wasn’t actually angry with Micah. In fact, I am always quite happy to see him. He is kind of like the house ghost: he lives there, but we don’t always see him. That’s life and we are all busy.

What got me worked up was that word: meeting.

For some reason, it just seems like I spend my entire life in meetings. I have bi-weekly meetings with ASC, monthly meetings with my newspaper staff, meetings to plan those meetings, group meetings for classes, and then various meetings that just seem to pop up. I probably should’ve seen this coming when I took up the role of Co-Editor-in-Chief of a student newspaper.

But I didn’t.

Of course, if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change the fact that I took the position. I might tell myself to get more organized a little sooner and maybe to figure out a bit more planning (or would that create some sort of Doctor Who-ish timey-wimey issue?), but I would still do the job.   Besides the problem is not the The Crescent.

Time paradoxes come with terrible consequences.

The whole ordeal is just about me coping and, so far, I have not done a well at that.

For me, my ability to cope is directly opposed to my anxiety. In fact, anxiety really opposes everything productive in my life.

In my counseling class this past Thursday, I realized that I had quit listening to what one of the members of my group was saying because I was sitting there stressing about….something that I don’t even remember now. Instead of being present with my group, I was off in another place worrying about things to come. I don’t even know how I started thinking about what I was thinking about. It could’ve been a word or phrase that someone said or something I saw. Regardless, it took me out of my group and, for that moment, made me useless to them.

I would love to say that I’ve come up with a solution. I would love to tell you that I’m okay. I would love to end this post with some sort of reassuring advice about anxiety to other people who suffer like this.

But, I can’t.

I can only set my teeth and put one foot in front of the other. Life doesn’t stop and neither can I.

And I don’t have to go it alone. I just need to find the humility to seek out help.

Me: “Can we not call it a meeting? It seems I spend my life in meetings.”

Now we’re calling it “Micah’s Tea Party.”

That feels like a step in the right direction.