Spinning Out
I am in the process of re-doing my website. As a part of the process, I am editing my blogs—over 400 of them--and moving them from the old site to the new site. It sounds like that would take a long time, right? Well, maybe for some who isn’t me. I am a wiz at this stuff, and even though it might take a long time for some other poor schlep. I can finish this is in a weekend—at least that is what I told myself.
Last weekend I approached this task full of gusto. I would buckle down and devote the whole weekend to my website and check this task off my very long list. First thing Saturday morning, I camped out on the couch and started working. Like all good high achievers, I took minimal breaks, and by Saturday night, eyes bleary, back and neck killing me, I had moved 20 blogs. Yep, you read that right. I moved TWENTY! At this rate, the process was going to take me WEEKS. To say the least, I was disappointed. Devastated would be more like it. My superhuman expectations for myself had met reality, and I didn’t quite know what to do with that.
So that was last Saturday—guess how many blogs I have moved over since then? None. Ok, well, maybe 5, but I have not made much progress on this project. What did I do instead?
Well, I spent most of this past week spinning. Spinning is what I do when a project is too big, and I don’t know how to tackle it, or I don’t have the patience to tackle it. So I spin. It is procrastinating with an added layer of beating myself up. It is 100% illogical and irrational, and unhelpful. My BFF (the voice of self-sabotage) steps in and encourages me to pout, and my Monger beats me up about it. And the fight is on! Back and forth they go.
I spent my time cleaning my office, zooming with colleagues, organizing my next project, baking brownies complete with homemade icing, and basically found anything to do except work on my website. And playing there all week long, just below the surface, was the message of how I wasn’t doing the THING I needed to be doing, and I was a loser, and because I wasn’t doing this website, I was going to be homeless and alone forever. (Honestly, it always amazes me how dark my Monger can go.)
I am endlessly amazed at how sneaky High Functioning Anxiety is. It can show up in a variety of ways.
Here are a few ways it showed up for me this week:
Spinning
Procrastinating
Thinking I am superhuman and can do it better
Lots of SHOULDS
All of nothing thinking (hard time seeing the baby steps)
Being touchy/grouchy
Beating myself up WAY more than necessary
Eating LOTS of sugar because I deserve it.
There is no solution here. I will start by accepting that this process will take me longer than I want it to and catching my spinning tendency as quickly as possible. So even though it pisses me off, I am not superhuman; tomorrow, I will be back at my desk editing my blogs and moving them from one site to another. I will call in the Biggest Fan and try to make it as fun and easy as possible, one post at a time.