Re: Managing Yourself

[Anonymous]

@Mike – Been there, done that. Still do sometimes. I don’t know if the ADD has anything to do with the way I hold onto things for so long. When I’m bored, I sometimes dig things up that have been buried for 25 years. Go figure.

Another thing I do is beat myself up over things that were only 80% perfect. Even when I know that nobody else could’ve done any better than I did, I mentally whip myself to sleep at night over things that I can’t do anything about. The odd thing is that I never get emotional about it. I’m just hyper-critical of myself.

Sometimes I actually visualize myself being beaten, whipped, cut, sometimes even shot. It’s like a part of my brain believes that visualizing this physical punishment on myself will somehow correct whatever it was that I think that I did or said wrong. I know it’s stupid, I can rationalize that. And I know that I would never really do anything to harm myself, so there are no worries there. I’m pretty sure that I’m incapable of that.

The ONLY thing that prevents me from going down that road–If I’ve had a successful day where I feel that I really accomplished something positive, did some really good work, learned something new and challenging, or just solved a nagging problem all of that goes away. And I don’t need validation from anyone else to TELL ME that I did well–I always know.

Dr. Phil says that we wouldn’t worry about what other people thought about us if we knew how seldom they did. I’m not a big Dr. Phil fan, but I caught that quote while channel-surfing one day and it was almost as if God was pushing the remote control buttons to make sure that I hit that channel at precisely that moment.

This concludes yet another off-topic post. It seems like a lot of threads around here wander. I’m glad I’m with people who understand.

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