Feeling Inside Out

We took the kid to see Inside Out 2 yesterday and…

I started crying at "I don’t know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can’t." and pretty much didn't stop.

Between my own experience with anxiety and parenting a kid who's been keeping herself awake at night with existential dread since she was four or five, I have a lot of, well, feelings about anxiety.

Bug seemed pretty mind blown about seeing an anxiety attack in a movie, and I do think it's one of the best takes on it that I've ever seen in media. I felt very, very seen, and so did Bug.

(Though one of the things Bug gets anxious about is "being more mature" and growing up, so I'm not sure it made her feel any better about puberty. But we'll worry about that when we get there.)

I'm not going to lie, I've been kind of a mess this month. I got microaggressioned at work, in the context of other things I'm frustrated about in a work context. And I'm very much fighting the battle against feeling invisible and unwanted in social contexts the last few weeks, which happened to dovetail today with a very weird semi-argument in a fannish discord that was just so frustrating.

I mentioned a character having a butch vibe when my spouse and I write/picture her even though we write her as involved with a guy, and somehow managing to upset someone who… I guess identifies with the character and so doesn't like thinking of the character that way because she's "canonically pretty" and because she herself is very girly.

Having 'butch' straightsplained to me was weird.

And I wish it didn't bother me, but it does. And there have been enough times in the past when my spouse and I were in the same spaces and therefore treated as basically the same person any time someone had a disagreement with either of us that being involved in a disagreement that also involves my S.O. makes me double-anxious.

It's stupid and I hate being like this but that doesn't make me not like this. And I'm a little frustrated that I just got done telling my doctor that my meds are fine and I'm doing great and then realizing that maybe I'm not great. Maybe I don't know what great is, maybe I never have.

Maybe we can't stop anxiety.

Maybe I'm just having a rough month.

I ended up dropping the summer classes to give myself some breathing room, and now I'm glad I did. It's definitely a weight off my shoulders.