I Get Derailed Easily

I get derailed easily and fast.  Relatively minor events can send me into a tailspin that spirals me into a dark and lonely place.  Small moments send me back to terrible times and I make associations with the present and past that do not exist.  

I've been looking for a cat for a few months.  I adore cats, and due to my ex-husband hating them, I've been without a cat for many years.  I'm also late 40's, and single AF, so cat lady felt appropriate. I really wanted a black cat.  And I found my perfect little panther named Vixen.  She was shiny black with sparkling blue eyes.  I submitted to adopt her and a home visit was planned.  I started looking at pink cat beds and towers.  I planned where her play area would be.  I dreamed up the Facebook post I would do about her.  I believed I would get her any day. 

The day before the home visit I received a text saying my kitty, Vixen, had been adopted by someone else.  I was never given a heads up that others were in the running before me and I could lose her.  I started out angry but this morphed into hurt.  Friends were trying to comfort me sending me cat pictures of other adoptable cats.  It was just a cat, right?  Yet losing this cat got bigger in my head.  The cat became every major loss I'd experienced.  Not getting her became every situation where I crumbled from disappointment.  "Why?" turned into "Why me?" which descended into "Why is it always me?"  Loneliness overtook me.  I shut off the lights, took a scalding bath, and sobbed for a loss of something I never had.

When this kind of spiral happens it amplifies anything in my life I see as off or wrong.  Headlight out, drain in the bathroom sink is messed up, taxes aren't together, medical procedure I'm scared about. None of these are life-ending things.  Life fucks up every day and these are truly minor inconveniences.  Yet my nervous system was in full survival mode.  Logic couldn't override the feelings.

I know I do this, and I know what experiences happened in my past to trigger these responses.  Awareness helps as I take active steps to pull it together instead of allowing a free fall into despair.  I get exasperated at myself that these "everything is awful" feelings still spring up.  Yet I can't control them.  I can manage them but I haven't found a way to make the thoughts not happen.

Maybe my hope of being a person that can shrug things off and smile is fully unrealistic.  Would any ESFJ, Leo, Type A, PTSD person ever think the glass is half full?  I'm a realist.  Perhaps I can get to a place where I'm content to have the glass at all and not feeling like it's almost empty and I'm dying of thirst.