Bumping into old patterns is not failure.
I’m 32 and the pattern I’m going to share with you has been in my life since elementary school.
I have a few quirks.
For instance, I went through a phase where I liked to do mock weather reports & once “covered” a solar eclipse from a table saw box on Facebook Live (people are still begging for more just sayin’). I also can’t pronounce CHIPOTLE correctly…ever. Then there’s tendencies that I would love to never deal with again.
When I first started therapy, I absolutely believed one day I’d walk out of that office and be done with anxiety. As I did the work, I went days, then weeks and occasionally even months before bumping into a situation where my familiar friend snuck up on me. Unsurprsingly, it’s never completely gone away.
My anxiety shows up in a few different ways.
The physical symptoms have morphed over time and overall I’m fairly equipped at coping with those. However, I’m 32 and the pattern I’m going to share with you has been in my life since elementary school and the one that trips me up the most. Tonight probably marked the millionth time it’s happened and, honestly, I was bullshit at myself for a few minutes.
Here’s what happened.
I needed to cook dinner. I opened the freezer and my options were extremely limited. I made eye contact with the frozen fish on the bottom shelf and the thought war immediately started…
“I wonder if that was actually fresh when they packed it.”
“Has it been stored right?”
“What if it’s bad and I eat it?”
“You’re ridiculous. You bought the fish. You know it’s fine.”
“You literally worked in a fish market for over a DECADE. You’re a good judge of quality.”
“You can’t keep buying stuff and just throwing it out.”
“You’re the ultimate food waster.”
“So you eat it and get food poisoning. Big deal. You’ll survive.”
Sounds like a super relaxing internal dialogue right? Why do I snap into this mode? I HAVE NO IDEA. I didn’t have some crazy traumatic food poisoning experience. It definitely connects to a fear of embarrassment and getting sick in front of others, but that’s the most I’ve ever been able to understand. I stopped trying to figure out the “why" a long time ago. The thoughts continued…
“Eat it. You get sick and you work from home in the morning and you’ll cancel your afternoon appointment. Big deal. The world won’t end. It happens.”
“That’s a giant inconvenience. Just play it safe and skip it.”
I don’t want to leave you with a cliffhanger for too long so here’s what happened…I ate the fish and then decided to make it the topic of this newsletter. TAKE THAT ANXIETY.
Thankfully, this internal food war doesn’t happen every day and it no longer paralyzes me.
Instead of beating myself up for hours about how ridiculous it is, I usually can diffuse it within a matter of minutes. For better or worse, I’m more prone to just chuck the suspect foods or at least leave them alone and revisit them again another day when I have more bandwidth to sit with the uncomfortable thoughts.
In the past, I’d not only mentally berate myself for the absurdity of the thoughts, but then force myself to eat the item in question and spend the next 24 hours waiting to be ravaged by a foodborne illness that would never arrive. This is a pattern that requires continual self-compassion and acceptance. I’d love to wish it away, but it’s decades strong.
So yes, sometimes (okay…frequently) I get pissed at the amount of money I waste tossing things as soon as they expire and get angry that I am a wasteful human.
However, I’ve started to think of it as another one of my quirks. I know it doesn’t make me a horrible human. I also know that just because I am still bumping into it, it doesn’t diminish the work I’ve done or put me back at square one. We all have our things.
So here’s what I want you to know.
Next time you encounter an old pattern you thought you’ve laid to rest, I hope that you recall this anecdote and try to lean into self-compassion. You can bump into things you thought were long gone and not treat it like a setback or a failure. It’s all about progress not perfection.
Wholeheartedly,
Maggie & her haddock
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Also- I made a quick video defining “Finding the Flotsam” for those who are curious. I’m not planning on posting on YouTube regularly, but needed a work around for Substack so here it is:
I’m a work in progress, the thing that keeps coming back to me, I was a victim of a violent crime. I thought I’d put that away but one day I decided to write about my “accident” as I used to call it. After writing out the story I just went OMG it feels a lot different when you write. So that set me back a bit but I can talk about and I can write about it but the fear is just under the surface. I have a hard time leaving the house,(I’m seeing a therapist). I’m doing the work but it’s slow progress. The thing that goes around my head ‘my life is at risk’ what should I do ? So on the busiest freeway in Southern California I was held captive by someone that says he’s going to kill me, and he takes the off-ramp and he’s not gonna stop at the stop sign, so at 42 miles per hour I jumped from the car. I was saying to myself “get up and run” but nothing moved, legs, hands but the adrenaline is still there. I was rescued by some people that saw me jump, rolled out the car door in a tuck and roll move that
Got me closest to the ground and away from the bad guy.