I've started to locate a lot of areas in my life that cause me very specific anxiety, and ways that I can start fixing them. Paying my bills on time. I always avoid opening bills because I find the whole act of doing that, and paying them, horribly depressing, so I just don't. But then they become late, and I wrack up fees, and creditors call me, and this causes me untold amounts of stress and depression, and it's all my fault, and if I would just pay my fucking bills on time, when I get them, this would never happen. And I wouldn't have to spend nearly as much money. duh.
So yesterday I bit the bullet and paid off everything I owe, including this super lame-o $103 fee to Time Warner Cable that I was just going to ignore since I no longer have Time Warner Cable, but I wanted to get them off my back. So now my bank account is significantly less (I had several issues pending), but I felt much better about it all, and I'm totally caught up on everything now. It feels nice.
I've also discovered that while I used to find television comforting (as some kind of "companionship," or portal to the outside world to fend off loneliness), that now I realize it depresses the hell out of me. Which I'm taking as a sign of maturity. I can sit in my living room and listen to music and do absolutely nothing, and feel less lonely than if I'm watching TV. And frankly, I find it very comforting that I feel this way. The passivity of it, I think, is what I find so bothersome. And the constant yammering of commercials and stupid people and laugh tracks.
I started reading The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromme yesterday, who was a very prominent psychologist in the 50's and 60's (very Christian-based and homophobic, too, but he was otherwise very intelligent, and everybody was homophobic in the 50's), and he talks a lot about love being an "activity, in the modern usage of the word...usually meant to bring about a change in an existing situation by means of an expenditure of energy." But then he goes on to talk about a man "driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness" actually being quite "passive," because he is a slave of his passion, and "his activity is in reality a 'passivity' because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the 'actor.'" But then he goes on to say that a man sitting, doing nothing but meditating quietly and contemplating "with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be 'passive'...in reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence." and on and on.
I thought this passage was particularly interesting because one thing my therapist and I dealt with quite a bit was my inability to be "in the moment," most of the time, and feeling like I always had to be looking to the future, or some pie-in-the-sky goal or whatever. I could never (and still can't, really, but I'm working on it) just take things day by day, or even moment by moment. Like, it's hard for me to sit still in a relationship and just enjoy it, or the moment, because I always want to know what's coming next, what everything "means," or why something is, or isn't, happening. I love it when I can read something like Fromme and immediately apply it to my life, and understand their wisdom and where they're coming from and what they're talking about. My constant restlessness: a sign of inner turmoil and insecurity (in a nutshell). Powerful stuff.
I'm also loving Mahler's Symphony No. 6: Tragic these days. It's on pretty much constantly. It doesn't sound tragic. It sounds like sunshine. Maybe that's the tragedy.
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