Dream On

Every person struggles with certain problems or issues for most of their life. We (hopefully) realize what these are and try to work through them. I can definitely list some stuff that I have trouble with often.

But you know what? Sometimes I feel like I can deal with all of that because I know to expect it. It’s there all the time, I’m pretty sure it’s not going away anytime soon, and I have techniques that I can apply to soften the blows. Or even if I can’t deal with it well, it’s nothing new, and I can predict what kinds of moods or response I’ll have to it. And I know that, eventually, I’ll probably drift out of those moods (and then slip back in again later). I’m picturing a sinusoidal wave here, people. I can estimate the frequency and the amplitude. It’s just a math equation with not-fun emotional consequences…but I’m used to those because I had lots of them in college (can we say real analysis II take-home exams?). ;)

So I’ve decided over the past week that what really bugs me is when I have some unexpected (bad) response to something, or when I experience some type of negative mood that doesn’t pop up very often at all in my life. The key word here is: unexpected. It really throws me off! And it really really annoys me, for a few reasons:

1. I feel silly having to confront something that usually doesn’t bother me at all.
2. I can never be sure if I’m really grappling with a new issue, or if it’s just that I’m extra vulnerable because I’m pretty sleepy or because of extremely overcast weather. The point is, maybe I wouldn’t be bothered by the same issue on a totally different day.
3. I end up spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out why I’m actually upset about something that usually just bounces off of me…and then I wonder if thinking about it too much just makes it worse (or more likely to come to mind again)
4. I wonder if this is going to become a new, more frequent issue
5. I wonder if this is just an old issue in disguise – it could have just been triggered by something completely different than usual.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this (surprise surprise), but I felt like writing about it, so I did. Hm, now that I look on the list I generated above, I see a common thread: I’m bothered by feeling uncertain. So maybe new or infrequent negative emotions bother me for two reasons: because they intrinsically are upsetting, and because I’m uncertain about what they are exactly and how to deal with them. Okay, I like it when writing helps me clarify something.

By the way, the ideas in this post mainly came about from thinking about my unexpected (and still ongoing) reactions to a weird dream I had last weekend. And then I had a sad dream last night…yeesh. Is there any evidence that eating chocolate before bed causes weird dreams? If there is, I’ll have to think extra-carefully about the chocolate…but in the end, we all know which choice I’ll make anyway. ;)