trip postponed

My work trip got postponed again! I shouldn’t be surprised, because they have been talking about this trip for about a year and keep pushing it back, but I was fairly certain it would actually be happening this time because the flights had already been booked.

At first I was incredibly annoyed, because I had gotten attached to the dates and had been planning non-stop and resigning myself to the fact that I would be doing this soon. I already went shopping and bought new professional clothes. I got my hair cut. I told my family I was coming. And then all of a sudden it was being called off. Now they are saying the trip might be in early June, but those sound like tentative dates, so basically I am back to knowing nothing. Which is frustrating.

At the same time, I’m now feeling so relieved I won’t be getting on a plane in a couple days. I was starting to have moments where I would be lying in bed in the morning, thinking “am I really going to be on my way to the airport one week from now?” and it didn’t feel real at all.

Anyway, it sounds like I have at least another month to prepare. Not that I can have any expectations, because hey, it’s much more fun for them to be unpredictable and wreak havoc with my stress levels. Maybe by Monday morning they’ll have decided it’s going to be next week.

But if nothing else changes, I’m sure I’ll be getting back to the CYEAT book in the meantime.

recap of NYC trip

I am home again - for the next week or so. First trip of the month completed, and it went really well. It went so well it was shocking and a little disorienting. Because one of the many downfalls of anxiety for me is that when I expect to have horrible anxiety during something and I don’t, it makes me feel strangely lost. I started feeling like I didn’t know myself, and then I started thinking really irrational things like “wait, do I even have anxiety problems? have I been exaggerating all this time? were all those terrible things I went through over the past few years lies?” And of course they weren’t - how could they have been? That doesn’t make any sense. I wish my mind didn’t only think in extremes.

The trip wasn’t perfect. I did experience some anxiety, but mostly in the realm of mentally obsessing over germs/contamination, which I see as better than intense emotional anxiety or physical symptoms like nausea. I was very aware all the time of the dirty things I was coming in contact with - cabs, public restrooms, train stations, etc. I’m used to feeling like my environment is very sanitized and I had to lower my standards and just try to get over the fact that I was not going to feel like things were clean enough for a week.

I had some trouble sleeping (thanks in large part to the hotel bed being incredibly uncomfortable). And there was one morning where I did feel really nauseous for a few hours and started to freak out. But I managed to calm myself down and decided I would relax in the hotel that morning instead of going out like I had planned. By the afternoon I felt fine again and we resumed our wandering through the city.

Not bad at all, considering what happened last time. I did not spend a night in the bathtub. I did not ever feel like I was going to legitimately lose my sanity.

But the biggest accomplishment is that I ate a normal amount for practically the entire trip. I don’t know if I have ever managed to do that before on a long trip like this. And that may be the main reason why the trip went so well, because when I don’t eat, it makes me feel terrible, and that makes my anxiety worse. Once that cycle starts, it’s hard to stop it.

All of this should probably make me feel more optimistic about the Virginia trip, but it doesn’t really. My stomach still feels like it’s dropping into my feet every time I think about it. I try to tell myself that since I was able to eat well in NYC, I should be able to do the same in Virginia, but then I think I can’t really compare the two. Virginia is going to be a lot more fast-paced and will involve tons of situations outside my comfort zone, and lots of social interaction, and I won’t feel as in control of any of it. I can’t exactly decide to take a morning off in the middle to regain my composure.

I talked to my boss about the social events, and she was really nice about it and said I could skip them if I felt like I couldn’t handle them, but she wanted me to be open to attempting to go to them, because it would be such a good opportunity to interact with everyone. So I guess I am going to try, at least for the first “welcome” event. I’m starting to wonder if it would just call more attention to me to skip them anyway. I don’t know. What’s more embarrassing, being noticeably absent from every social event, or going to them and being super nervous and maybe not being able to eat and having to come up with some excuse for why you’re not eating? I really can’t decide.

traveling

I keep trying to motivate myself to blog about the next chapter, but I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that CYEAT posts are going to be on hold until early to mid May. Because I can’t think about anything but the two week-long trips I am taking this month. So I’m going to write about that instead.

I mentioned in here a while back that my bosses want me to travel to Virginia for a week of training. It was originally supposed to be sometime last fall or winter, but it kept getting delayed. Now it’s finally happening, during the last week of this month.

Which is about the worst timing ever, because my wife and I also planned a week-long trip to NYC that starts at the end of this week and goes into next week. That trip alone was already stressing me out, and that’s going to be the easier one. The one where my wife is with me and we go at a slow pace and she makes sure I don’t get too overwhelmed.

No matter how carefully we navigate it, I know I will experience a lot of anxiety and it will really wear me out. And now I’m going to get back from that trip, have about a week and a half to relax and get back to homeostasis, and then have to leave for the training trip, which will be a thousand times harder. And I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending most of that in-between time obsessing over the second trip rather than relaxing. I already can’t stop obsessing about the second trip even though right now I should be preparing for the first one.

There are, I guess, three major concerns I keep going over:

- The actual traveling part. I hate flying. I hate all public transportation. We’re taking a train to NYC and that’s a little easier for me, but taking a train to Virginia could potentially take a full day (or night) and I don’t want that. So I figure I will suck it up and do the plane. But I have only flown alone once before, and it was in 2007. Pre-breakdown. I honestly have no memory of how I managed it. Everything seems so much harder now. So I will have to fly and navigate an airport, because of course there will be a layover, possibly more than one. Then once I get there, my boss has arranged that the hotel shuttle will take me back and forth to the work building. Screw that. I will probably rent my own car so I can have control over my coming and going. Oh, and also, as of right now, I can’t find a good flight connection, which may mean I will have to fly into an airport in a city a couple hours away and then figure out how to get to my destination from there. And I am not comfortable driving on the interstate. The only solution I can come up with so far is that my mother picks me up (and drops me off again at the end of the trip) because she lives nearby. But I’m not loving that idea either.

- Eating, drinking, sleeping. Any time I get really stressed out, I start doing all of these things less. This always happens to me on trips. I don’t feel well, so I don’t eat or drink as much. I get super dehydrated. My blood sugar is low all the time. I feel weak and shaky and sick and weird. Everything around me feels kind of surreal. But if I try to force myself to eat and drink more, that makes me feel nauseous, especially if I am trying to eat around other people or if I attempt to eat anything that isn’t completely bland. And it starts to feel almost physically impossible, since I have no appetite. After a day or so of that, I’m exhausted and it feels like an ordeal even to get out of bed. But I’ll have to get out of bed, go to work, focus on training, and socially interact with people. I’m thinking I will probably plan out every single thing I’m going to eat in advance and try to stick to that meal plan as much as possible, but I’m not sure how successful I will be.

- The social interaction. I’m not around people much anymore, and it’s honestly a huge relief most of the time, because I have a very strong desire to appear perfect to everyone around me combined with an inability to stop being horribly awkward. Which I think usually comes across as me being rude rather than scared (ignoring people, nervously laughing at things I shouldn’t laugh at, blank stares, sarcasm, and general stoicism). My boss has planned five socializing meals for us to attend. They all sound terrifying. It sounds like a few will involve large groups of people, including many people I have communicated with for several years but who have never met me face to face, so they will probably want to meet me face to face, and it’s too much to even think about. It is my goal to get out of every single one of those. Especially because three of them are lunches on training days, and if I go to those and am not able to eat, I don’t know how I will make it through the afternoons.

Also, I have no way of knowing how many panic attacks I’m going to have while I’m around my coworkers. It’s funny, because I used to work in the building with them, so it’s not like I haven’t dealt with that before. I have had anxiety attacks during one-on-one face-to-face meetings with my boss and been able to hide it. So it’s likely I’ll still be able to hide it pretty well. But part of me worries. I’m out of practice. And then of course there’s the fact that I don’t want to have anxiety attacks, whether I can hide them well or not, because they are miserable and further contribute to me feeling completely exhausted and out of it. But I don’t think I’m going to be able to avoid that. I’m guessing I will have them during the training sessions, when I feel most obligated to be composed and focused, when I know it would be bad for me to leave the room because that is after all what I’m there for. To try to learn something in the midst of all this insanity.

I probably should have fought harder to get out of this trip. I did try to get out of it, but it was a pathetic attempt, because I get too embarrassed to lay out exactly how bad it’s going to be. And I get scared thinking “am I really going to bail on something else? am I seriously going to be this person all my life?” I want to be able to do things. This particular thing feels way out of my reach, but I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be as bad as I’m imagining. I just have to do it. I have to do it, because it’s even harder to handle the thought of saying ‘no, absolutely not, you have no idea what this is going to do to me.’ And part of me worries I would end up getting fired.

I have internalized so much mental health stigma and it makes me feel guilty to even be saying some of this, because I believe people should push back more in these situations and advocate for themselves. I just feel like I can’t do it anymore. I have done it so many times and gotten so many horrible reactions. I had teachers in high school who literally made me cry because they were so mean to me for refusing to give class presentations, even though I told them I didn’t mind taking a zero for the assignment. Wouldn’t it be nice if the automatic reaction was to say ‘that’s fine, there are of course perfectly valid alternatives to presentations (or intense week-long out of state training sessions) and this doesn’t make you a lesser person at all‘? I think society is heading more in that direction, but it’s taking a long time.