Yesterday the plan was to be working in the morning and babysitting at night, with a long afternoon to myself. Got a call first thing in the morning from my manager asking if I could cover the two afternoon birthday parties for my co-worker whose granddad was in the hospital. Of course the answer was yes, and there went my afternoon-to-self. And I needed it, and I knew I did. There was something under my skin, something I needed to process. I felt it all day yesterday, all morning today. By the time I got through work today I was feeling, on top of the usual strain that comes from being an introvert with an extravert’s job, a palpable cramped-ness in my mental workings.

So I got home, sequestered myself, and did my favorite quasi-meditative activities… lying down and listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams, spinning while listening to my Arachne mix CD… and then I started to journal.

I had three topics in mind I suspected I needed to work on. I got through the first one. That was scary enough that I decided to emerge from the cloister into the world of brothers and football and meatballs and hamster families. And blogs, apparently.

The point of this story is that I really like that I can do this now — feel something wrong, know what I have to do to get at it, and then do it. It’s a big step for me. Those who have known me for a while know that my response time to emotional stimuli is, well, slow. I’m tempted to say glacial. Whereas some people, if you do something that makes them angry, will lash right back at you, it will take me about 24 hours to even realize that I’m angry. And then another 24-48 to decide what to do about it. This makes me spectacularly good in a crisis, since any emotions that might cloud my judgement don’t even show up until it’s all over, but it is not so great for things like relationships, where people have a reasonable expectation that if they ask “what do you want?” or “how do you feel?” I should at least know the answer.

Coping with this has been a continual project in my life, and I’m very pleased that I’ve progressed to this point: I knew something was off pretty much from the moment it went off. I still had to squirrel myself away in private to figure out what it was, but at least I spotted it.