So, life, yeah...
So I returned back to my house on Monday evening after spending time in London, back to the atmosphere of my house, which was as thick as when I left it. I could feel the stress building just by being there. Before it got too bad I sat down and meditated and that really, really helped. It's funny how something one never uses and never otherwise thinks about can suddenly become really useful and important. But when I first learnt to meditate, there was the lesson of picking your mind up off some distraction and putting it back down onto something it's meant to be concetrating on and recently I've been using it a lot to get rid of certain automatic thoughts that have bugged me for a few years. So, given that I needed to pull my mind off something that was really bugging me, I decided to see if meditation was the equivalent of bringing up the heavy guns. It was. I had a really good session, the kind where you get the prickly feeling all over your skin and your mind just pulls itself into one tight razor of concentration. I also felt so very serene. Suddenly my housemate didn't matter to me at all, nor did anything else. I just existed and I was happy to just be.
All of that made what happened next a lot easier to take. I'd been to the loo earlier and had some salami rind that hadn't passed through properly. Before I managed to figure it all out, I must have messed the bathroom without noticing because I went downstairs and shit on my teatowel with a sarky note left by my housemate. I feel bad about having accidently left a mess like that, but undigested stuff has only happened to me twice before and the stress my housemate is putting me through probably contributed to it (and definitely to me not noticing: I get so inward looking when I'm stressed). But I can't help thinking that her reaction to that was unreasonable: she could have just got me to clean it up, after all, accidents and strange stuff do happen to people. I don't know, what do you people think? Anyway, I wrote her a note back telling her it was accident and that she completely overeacted.
Tuesday dawned and I really wanted to get cracking with work. I figure that if work is going, I can use it to feel good about myself despite all the factors eroding that. I know it's risky, because my self-esteem is completely defined by what I achieve and if it goes wrong, my life will collapse. But I did have a very good day. I worked extremely hard and wrote a lot of code and at the end of the day I was very tired and a bit too blood-sugar low. I went home eventually and tried to cope with the stressful atmosphere and this is where I cracked: I'd poured too much of myself into the work I'd done. Nothing helped, even meditation. My housemate had replied to my letter and basically told me that she knew it was an accident but she didn't care and was frustrated with cleaning up after me and couldn't approach me because of all the "huffing and puffing" I do when she talked to me in the past (well, would you want to talk to someone who obviously hated you from the moment they walked into the house? I thought we'd cleared that up in our last talk, but obviously not) and then pointed out some times I'd not tidied some mess I'd left around the house, most of them examples from since we had our argument (strange that, did I say stress makes me more indrawn?) and continued by calling me abnormal and weird. I wrote a long treatise back which didn't make me feel better and just expressed the levels of rage I felt, although I kept it civil. I pretty much threatened to keep her awake at night if she wants to be petty. I know she's better at being petty then I am so it's a completely pointless excercise, but my head gave me that as an option or the mentally very bad cave in to her.
Wednesday started badly. I had trouble sleeping and the stress made it difficult to get up. I crawled out of bed at 2pm and instituted a recovery program. I'm proud of myself: I got out of the house and into the center of town and went to see Pirate of the Carribean 2, which really relaxed me a lot (and by the way was excellent). I cycled out to town along the canal in the sunshine which also helped with the rage and stress I felt and by the time I came back home, I'd also managed to get 1.5 hours of work done. So, yeah, yeah, I'm feeling much better and coping much better and actually ready and able to think my way out of this place. I think I'm going to do a bit more work now as I don't feel like I could sleep which means I'll still have something to show my supervisor tomorrow at the meeting.
All of that made what happened next a lot easier to take. I'd been to the loo earlier and had some salami rind that hadn't passed through properly. Before I managed to figure it all out, I must have messed the bathroom without noticing because I went downstairs and shit on my teatowel with a sarky note left by my housemate. I feel bad about having accidently left a mess like that, but undigested stuff has only happened to me twice before and the stress my housemate is putting me through probably contributed to it (and definitely to me not noticing: I get so inward looking when I'm stressed). But I can't help thinking that her reaction to that was unreasonable: she could have just got me to clean it up, after all, accidents and strange stuff do happen to people. I don't know, what do you people think? Anyway, I wrote her a note back telling her it was accident and that she completely overeacted.
Tuesday dawned and I really wanted to get cracking with work. I figure that if work is going, I can use it to feel good about myself despite all the factors eroding that. I know it's risky, because my self-esteem is completely defined by what I achieve and if it goes wrong, my life will collapse. But I did have a very good day. I worked extremely hard and wrote a lot of code and at the end of the day I was very tired and a bit too blood-sugar low. I went home eventually and tried to cope with the stressful atmosphere and this is where I cracked: I'd poured too much of myself into the work I'd done. Nothing helped, even meditation. My housemate had replied to my letter and basically told me that she knew it was an accident but she didn't care and was frustrated with cleaning up after me and couldn't approach me because of all the "huffing and puffing" I do when she talked to me in the past (well, would you want to talk to someone who obviously hated you from the moment they walked into the house? I thought we'd cleared that up in our last talk, but obviously not) and then pointed out some times I'd not tidied some mess I'd left around the house, most of them examples from since we had our argument (strange that, did I say stress makes me more indrawn?) and continued by calling me abnormal and weird. I wrote a long treatise back which didn't make me feel better and just expressed the levels of rage I felt, although I kept it civil. I pretty much threatened to keep her awake at night if she wants to be petty. I know she's better at being petty then I am so it's a completely pointless excercise, but my head gave me that as an option or the mentally very bad cave in to her.
Wednesday started badly. I had trouble sleeping and the stress made it difficult to get up. I crawled out of bed at 2pm and instituted a recovery program. I'm proud of myself: I got out of the house and into the center of town and went to see Pirate of the Carribean 2, which really relaxed me a lot (and by the way was excellent). I cycled out to town along the canal in the sunshine which also helped with the rage and stress I felt and by the time I came back home, I'd also managed to get 1.5 hours of work done. So, yeah, yeah, I'm feeling much better and coping much better and actually ready and able to think my way out of this place. I think I'm going to do a bit more work now as I don't feel like I could sleep which means I'll still have something to show my supervisor tomorrow at the meeting.