The freakout continues

Continuing on the theme of at least one mind-boggling thing happening each day this week (one of these days I'll back up and catch everyone up on everything that went down last weekend, which is when this unsettling string of events began), I got a frantic phone call from Mr. A this afternoon at work, in which he told me that a long-dreaded project at his work is finally about to begin.

Usually when he has to go away for work, it's like this week – he leaves on Sunday, works through the week and is back home by Friday night. This time, he's going to be gone for three months straight. Sparing the ugly details, the schedule they have planned is beyond grueling, and he's understandably extremely anxious.

As for me, I have my own stuff I'm worrying about these days. I don't like it – having worrisome situations in my life, or worrying about them. Actually, I feel like I've already used up my lifetime's allotment of worrying time – free-falling into anxiety and doomsday thinking seems to come naturally to me for some reason, and I've gotten so good at it over the years that I hardly have to make any effort anymore to just instantly descend into a seemingly bottomless pit – maybe more of a tunnel – of angst and nameless despair ...

Except! I'm trying to do things differently right now, and part of that includes not just automatically relaxing back into my same old familiar patterns when things start changing suddenly and at a pace I'm not completely comfortable with.

For example, when I was listening to Mr. A on the phone this afternoon, and he was so upset I was having a hard time understanding him, one thing I did hear him say was, "You know how I get when I have to deal with things like this."

And I thought, but didn't say, "No, I don't know how you 'get.' I know how you've gotten in the past, but that doesn't mean you have to go on that way forever."

I didn't say it because he's still on the road, and he's already upset, and my goal is to support him and help him, not to ascend the soapbox and lecture him about How To Change Your Attitude And Feel GREAT About LIFE!!!™

But seeing him in his struggle, and trying to figure out ways to help him through, is useful for me, too, when I remember to always mirror all my questions and complaints about him, back toward myself. If I feel grumpy, anxious and afraid because I think his attitude sucks, a lot of the time if I really look at it, it becomes clear that the primary reason I'm feeling that way is because my own attitude pretty much sucks. Kind of like right now.

I can really see myself, in this entry, slipping into some dramatic, catastrophic habits of thinking – the kind I'm trying to learn to bypass in order to see things more clearly as they really are.

Not to deny or disregard legitimate emotions and concerns, but the way I want to see this is simple. Not all deep, dark and convoluted. Just ... simple. I feel a list coming on:

1. He's going to be away for several months.
2. I know this does not make him happy.
3. I have some concerns about how he's going to handle his emotions.
4. As for my own emotions, I am stepping up my meek and tentative little yoga practice (which I also want to write about one of these days), making more art, gradually de-hermitizing and reconnecting with friends I haven't seen since summer, and continuing to speak as honestly as I can with him about things that are important to me.

In other news, I'm seriously considering breaking up with Blogger and moving this thing over to Wordpress. I'm sick of the neverending problems with the "new and improved" Blogger, and Wordpress has several features that I'd really like to use, including the ability to password-protect individual entries (not just the whole blog). I'm checking out the options and will leave a forwarding link if I do decide to move.