Last week, following two induction weeks, I had my first week of proper lessons. It has gone surprisingly well, much better than the previous two years. However, I have had my first wobble today. I learnt in therapy that avoidance is my primary safety behaviour, and I’ve also learnt about the vicious cycle. I am scared to go into uni, so I avoid going into uni, so I miss out on getting to know people and what I’m supposed to be doing; so I’m even more scared to go into uni, so I avoid it even more and therefore I miss out even more. Now that I can recognise how my dumb brain works when I’m anxious, I’m trying to make an effort to prove my avoidance instincts wrong whenever they pop up. I managed to do a full week last week, which I’m proud of myself for, and I hope that it will be just one of many full weeks this year; but this current week will not be one of them. Last week we were put into our bands for the first part of the year. This is for a module called Major Performance (named for the big assignment performance we will have for it), so this is the group of people we will be spending many hours with every week in one small rehearsal room. I like my group thankfully. However yesterday, when a shy member of our band left the room, the rest of the group started talking about him very negatively. They were venting about how he plays so quietly and doesn’t join in discussions and doesn’t make any decisions about his parts. I like this boy - it’s true that he is reserved and doesn’t pipe up much but I don’t think that makes him a liability for the band. This is a guy that socialises with the class outside of lessons and has friends on the course, so I couldn’t stop worrying about how, if they were saying that about him, what were they saying about me, who also doesn’t speak up and has been told I perform too quietly as well as not socialising outside uni? I also learnt about the idea of the ‘self-conscious image’ in therapy, and I’m not sure if the picture I had in my brain of my band-mates talking badly about me in my absence counts as a self-conscious image, since my ‘self’ isn’t actually in the image, but I tried to calm myself down with the techniques I’d been taught for dealing with the self-conscious image. They did not work - they relied on the fact that ‘thoughts are not reality’, and that if you wouldn’t think that way about someone, then other people probably aren’t thinking that way either, and if they were then that means they are the unusual part of this scenario, not you. But everything I saw and heard yesterday contradicted that. Everyone in the room was talking about our shy guitarist. I was the only one who wasn’t. I was the outlier. So avoidance won today. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go in and spend the day self-conscious and paranoid with that classic pit-in-the-stomach anxiety. The one silver lining about being in an emotional state like this (especially anxiety or anger) is that it’s great for songwriting. I’ve got images and words whirring madly around my brain already, I might as well channel them into something useful. This is how I calm myself down when I’m at home. I start venting into my journal, getting all my anxious thoughts down, then when I’m finished I can re-read my entry and comb through to find lines that might fit coherently together (sometimes there’s good stuff, sometimes there isn’t, sometimes the words have already seemed to form themselves into a metaphor while I’m journaling, and sometimes I need to come up with a metaphor to tie all the themes together - it doesn’t matter). By then I’m feeling a little better because I’ve just completed a task, and I’ve given myself a new task to shift my focus onto. Then I start to arrange the lyrics and write rhymes and meters into what I’ve got. When I’ve finished with a rough set of lyrics from start to finish I start to feel even better because now I’m feeling inspired, and I’m excited to open up my DAW and get all my musical ideas for this song down. When I’ve fixed down/tried out all those little inspiration bursts you get from starting a new project, I take a break and have a brew and a biscuit and watch some comfort media, and if I’ve finished my tea before the episode is over, I’ll play Minecraft. (I call that Burrowing). By the time that stage is finished, I’ve had a bit of dopamine and a bit of serotonin. I’ve gotten to vent, I’ve engaged with something familiar, I’ve done something creative and productive, and now I’ve got something to look forward to - which is a new song to work on. I’ll spend a Pomodoro session working on said song, and my problem won’t feel as big and unmanageable anymore. So I’m going to do that now. :]