Overpositivity

I have been a bit worried recently that the things I write here are only ever reasonably positive, and paint an unrealistic picture of my life. On the whole, I am doing well right now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I’m struggling with, and only sharing the good and not the bad is a criticism I often levy against social media sites like Instagram. In the spirit of at least trying not to be a hypocrite, I want to at least try to get back to writing about some of the bad stuff, but there’s a fine line between honest vulnerability and whining, particularly when, like I said, a lot of my so-called problems right now could simply be solved by some perspective and re-framing. The biggest reason why I don’t really write too much negative these days is simply because of the feedback I get from it - people worry unnecessarily, I have to deal with it, I feel bad, etc etc. Maybe this is just something those people will have to leave with though, and I’ll stop pandering to it quite as much.

So, rather than do what my friends do and only ever post about their skiing holidays or their getting engaged or new cars (clearly I need new friends), some brief lowlights of 2022 so far:

• I’m constantly terrified of getting injured, and I know if I can’t run the EUT for whatever reason I will almost certainly have a major depressive episode
• I have both healthy and unhealthy reasons to be losing weight (which I am currently doing with some success), and I am telling myself that because I have at least some healthy driving forces for it it’s OK, but on some level I know that there will be some negative backlash to it. I feel powerless to prevent this though.
• In the same vein, now I’ve lost a little bit of weight I am only becoming more obsessed with it - I look at myself in the mirror a lot, constantly surprised to actually feel OK with what I see, but this makes me fixate on weight more, want to keep losing it, etc etc. I have no idea if this will stop at any point, or if there is a way to do this more healthily, and I know the flipside is that if I put on weight again (eg if I get injured) then the reverse might be true, I might constantly look in the mirror and feel bad about myself. At least that would be a return to familiarity.
• My new relationship is going really well, but much like getting injured, I’m also constantly terrified of jeopardizing it. I don’t really understand why this feels different to my previous, archetypally “borderline” relationships and so I don’t understand how to prevent it from becoming one, but I know that if it does become one it’ll be an absolute disaster for my mental health. I’m also acutely aware of my mental health being the most likely thing to jeopardize it in the first place, which is a particularly unpleasant source of irony.
• I am really unmotivated at work at the moment, for a variety of reasons. I don’t think it’d be the right choice to look for another role, but I have struggled to shake off the post-Christmas slump (possibly in part due to my contracting covid), and being unproductive/not making progress towards my career goals makes me feel bad about myself.
• I’m struggling to feel fulfilled in many of my close personal friendships. This is in part because I’ve not set aside enough time for them, in part because it’s harder to maintain them when me and the majority of my close friends have partners of varying degrees of seriousness, and in part because I still don’t have the self confidence to be honest and vulnerable and ask questions that interest me or share the things that are on my mind.

I also know that all these things are, basically, totally fine and I am inventing things to struggle with at this point. But, perhaps that is just the way that it goes and I will have to accept that. Hopefully I’ll write a little more candidly about some of them in the near future.