#LoveMe Day Twelve: Share A Flaw

The weekend has arrived! It’s also spring, which marks the start of flat out busy weekends for me. I think my next free weekend is sometime in November but I’m pretty sure that won’t last. It’s funny, I spend the winter having relatively quiet weekends, sometimes wishing there was more going on yet come spring and suddenly it’s a whirlwind of activities and responsibilities that makes me sometimes wish for a quiet day.

Never satisfied, maybe that could be my flaw for today’s topic.

My flaw I have chosen to discuss today is my tendancy to jump to conclusions. I’m almost certain it’s linked to my anxiety, because it’s usually a thinking error.  It’s a negative habit that I’m trying to break, but one that creeps up on me at the least expected times.

Today for example, I got it into my head that my friend Lioness, who I wrote about yesterday, was angry at me for writing about her and didn’t want me in her life anymore. The reason I thought this, was because I hadn’t heard from her by lunch time. The fact that I knew she had a busy day planned didn’t come into it, in my head, she was mad at me.

Of course she wasn’t, like I said earlier, she had a lot on today and when I did hear from her one of the first things she told me was how touched she was that I’d written about her on the blog.

If I send someone a text message and they don’t reply in a ‘timely’ manner, I often freak out and spend a while wracking my brain for reasons why they could be angry at me. If someone isn’t bright and cheery towards me I often jump to the same conclusion. It starts as a niggly feeling in my stomach that quickly turns to a consuming anxious feeling that no amount of reasoning with myself will lessen.

I don’t like to tell the people in particular that I’m concerned that I think they may be annoyed with me. I used to, but I was almost always wrong and I felt that it made me look a bit ridiculous.

See, here’s the thing: I know its irrational. I know that people don’t get pissed off that easily and if I do somehow manage to annoy the people that care, they will tell me. Not in the nasty yelling or confrontational way that scares me, just in a ‘hey man, that wasn’t cool,’ kind of way. But somehow knowing this fact doesn’t stop me from jumping to conclusions for the smallest of reasons.

A long term goal of mine is to leave this flaw behind. The fact that I know it’s irrational is an achievement. Even this time last year I didn’t think it was irrational, I thought that it was completely normal to jump to the worst case scenario and run with it. In time, I hope that jumping to conclusions will be a thing of the past. Baby steps.

Smiles and Sunshine
Katie