Expectations

When I was walking out the door to head to work, I thought to myself “what am I’m forgetting? I’m missing something. ” And then I thought about that thought, and “why?” Obviously I don’t know what I’m forgetting or I wouldn’t feel like I was forgetting something. Still, is it that I feel like I’m forgetting something? I arrived at the conclusion I felt unprepared. Again, I questioned that conclusion with a kind of clinical detachment I’m not usually capable of. “Do I just not feel prepared?”

That made me consider, what would prepared look like? Like I could tackle any issues that arose throughout the day, and would adapt to circumstances as necessary? That is pretty reasonable. So yeah, but that’s what I was already going to do. I’m going to tackle any challenges that come my way and adapt as necessary. So I am prepared. But that’s not what it feels like, that’s what prepared is. That’s rationality. Where’s the feeling, huh? Just out there. Maybe self doubt? Doesn’t matter.

To some degree. we choose how we feel, right? If I decide that I’m prepared, would that affect the way that I feel? Like really, really decide, fundamentally and not superficially. So much of my day-to-day work is creative problem solving. And there’s very little I can do to prepare, other than go in with an open mind and as few expectations as possible.

You know what? Taking the time to break this down a little actually did make me feel better.

So the conclusion is we control our feelings, or we control how we feel, but we have to define that expectation in order for it to affect its physical manifestation.

What would feeling ‘healed’ look like?

So Karla, my therapist, has been trying to get me to consider what being healed would look like behaviorally. Because I don’t have a discrete definition, I don’t know that I can define what it would feel like. Feelings are so diaphanous. Even attempting to distill an emotion to its physical symptoms seems silly. Like the way that movies can make you cry by way of a subtle shift in music and lighting, and facial expressions, mixed with the narrative already invested. This is assuming suspension of disbelief remains intact. All of those things, put together will evoke an emotion. But it evokes it in the body. The mind doesn’t play into it too much. Perhaps it’s that I think I’m prepared rather than I am prepared.

Name of Wind reference

It’s like the in Name of the Winds. Kvothe talks about how “…to love something, despite its flaws, is easy, as easy as picking up a penny off the ground. But to love something because of its flaws, is true beauty.” There’s some truth to that, how you can tell a woman that she’s beautiful, and you can wax poetically and you can spell it out across the sky. But until she believes it, she is seen as beautiful. Over time as you treat her as a beautiful woman, she’ll go from being seen as beautiful to being beautiful, seen.

Back to Feeling/Being prepared

So it’s less about being prepared or being seen as prepared, to engender feeling prepared. It’s as being prepared repeatedly. If I build a routine and I’ll go from being seen as prepared to being prepared.