Multiple

[jehoshabeath]

The following post comes from a document that I wrote a few months ago at work. I was feeling overwhelmed without anything to do; and it was so stressful that I decided to try writing my thoughts down in order to get a handle on them. I guess it helped at the time, but it makes me feel anxious to read because I still feel this way at times. When

Comments

[ext_2016505]

I think this post captures a lot of the things I feel when I'm overwhelmed, except that writing is the last thing I feel able to do when I'm in that situation. As a result, I've never been able to capture my thoughts in the moment in written form the way you have here.

All of the tasks that linger in the future, but which I can't do anything about now, carry a real weight in times like that. I know that I'm supposed to concentrate on one thing at a time and put the rest out of my mind, but they are still *there*! How can I put them out of my mind without forgetting them entirely?

Your answer to the question of how you feel in times like that, "multiple," sounding almost like a category error, reminds me of my freshman year in college, when in one class our professor asked each of us to characterize how we were handling things after one week with a weather analogy, like "sunny" or "partly cloudy," or "stormy, but with signs of clearing up." When it came to me, I was completely unable to come up with a weather term, and ended up saying "It's been tough." (It was some time later that I realized the perfect answer would have been "avalanche.")