Since classes started I no longer feel pressured to enjoy myself. Oddly, this is making me more relaxed. I am spending more late afternoons at the swimming pool than I did during the summer, for instance.
And I may give up on attending Rising Tide this weekend, as I cannot really afford a weekend in town at this point. That is disappointing on the one hand, but relaxing on the other since I will not have to do anything like cut into my very paltry savings or put off paying a utility bill.
No longer being Reeducated means being able, once again, to work steadily and without doubting myself, whether I am in a perfect mood for this or not. This means I know I can get things done, which, in turn, is making me relaxed.
“You put a great deal of pressure on yourself,” said a colleague and friend some years ago. I did not doubt he had some insight on me, but I did not understand at all what he meant. “Yes, we have high pressure jobs, we are under pressure,” I said. “Should we not have high standards?”
Now I believe I glimpse his meaning. Turning the pressure level down does not mean lowering one’s ultimate standards or getting less done during the week. It just means turning the pressure level down, relaxing as one walks through things.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
That makes sense. Having more confidence allows you to relax whilst doing as good a job as before, if not better.
I must confess that for about 10 years or so it has been hard for me to relax. This was due to my taking an inappropriate job about that long ago (although little did I realise it at the time). The job required me to do detailed clerical work — something that I have belatedly realised I have no aptitude for. It was also a job in which the clerical staff were belittled and treated as scapegoats for whatever went wrong further up the hierarchy. It was, indeed, a very disfunctional workplace in which we were not so much facilitated to do our jobs, as sat on and made to pay for however badly everybody else was feeling. So, I endured that until I realised that my health had been eroded so badly that it would not improve whilst I stayed in that workplace. I left, but the sense of stress remained with me. The internalisation of stressfulness as as a kind of imperative to surviving in an unsuitable environment — well, it doesn’t exactly faciliate a relaxed mode of efficiency.
Internalization of stressfulness, yes. Oddly, the stress has to become “normal” (and thus pass under the radar) because if you allowed yourself to feel it fully, it would be too horrifying / too much of an impediment. That then makes it hard to slough off even after you leave.
Remember even Hercules did his tasks one at a time.
I just got through a really stressful summer training session on the road to becoming a literacy specialist. There were points where my health was shot (my left ear closed completely shut the night before my 8 hour standardized test for certification) but in the end I managed the 2 graduate courses, the myriad of administrative tasks and my field reports just fine. Well better than when I worked at that freakin’ madhouse of a publishing company 10 years back.
I attribute it to taking one step at a time and learning not to look too far ahead. That is the death to all self-assurance when juggling more than one thing. Your mind should really be working to COMPLETE one thing.
I think part of it was a culture shock. I concluded, from the experience, that people hated me, and that I always had to be ready for an unexpected attack of hatred. Ironically, as was very shy and reverent before this happened. So I lost my reverence, gained a lot of stress — but also gained some confidence in realising that I had been much better than I had been treated.
Yes!
Unbeached: yes, good point – although to implement it you must first be present for the task, find out how to be or become present – which is part of what I mean by connecting to the axé here.
“I concluded, from the experience, that people hated me, and that I always had to be ready for an unexpected attack of hatred.”
This I think is one of the conclusions people commonly draw from abusive situations that they don’t fully, or don’t yet recognize as such.
This I think is one of the conclusions people commonly draw from abusive situations that they don’t fully, or don’t yet recognize as such.
Sort of. I think that even if the situation is recognised as abusive, this emotional reaction is still prevalent. And there is a certain adaptive rationality about this, because just be recognising the presence of abusiveness, we do not thereby eliminate it either in the present or the future as a material possibility. It can always happen again, especially in so far as others do not also recognise it as abusive and take steps to prevent it from happening.
Yes, and this is particularly true: “especially insofar as others do not also recognise it as abusive and take steps to prevent it from happening.” And also when abusiveness characterizes the whole social space (as opposed to being anomalous, set apart). Yet I find I prepare most for these unexpected attacks of hatred when dealing with or reacting to a situation I have not yet fully processed / do not yet fully understand / cannot yet fully stand apart from.
Yes, I think you are right about that last statement of yours — definitely.