Unlike a lot of people here in the U.S., I don’t get very stressed about Christmas. For one thing, if you come from a very small family most of whom are dead, then you don’t really feel the familial pressure of gift giving, cards, parties, traveling, etc. For another, I’m an atheist, so aside from a sentimental love of holiday carols, the season holds no particular spiritual meaning for me.

Yet, I still manage to stress myself out. *head!desk*

I’m trying to get over a cold that literally knocked me down and out for over a week, catch up on reading books I put aside over the course of dealing with grad school last term, write through a long-standing writer’s block, work on websites and blogs and art projects…

The biggest issue isn’t that I have planned to do a lot, but that I’m paralyzed by a lack of priorities. This is something that haunts my writing projects and has stalled me before: I have so many ideas, I want to write them all NOW, and I can’t, so I just stare at the blank screen and the blinking cursor with my mind on a critical loop as I keep sorting my list over and over and over and over.

Part of it is my desperate need for a sense of accomplishment. It’s almost boundless, therefore impossible to satisfy. I can do 20 tasks in a day and still look at what was left undone with a sense of holistic failure. Which is what I’m doing over the holidays, instead of (say) relaxing with a good book.

In these periods, reading the inspirational blogs that normally drive me to do more-better things is fatalistic. I feel like they are only showing me how badly I’m doing. But that’s all in my head, in the truest sense; and like most of our lives, it is ALL IN OUR HEAD.

I was reading one blog recently by someone who is having some tumultuous times, and he wondered if just being positive in outlook would make things better. Short answer? Yes. Because – to repeat – it’s all in our head.

Not the bad things that happen, or the snow storm, or the toilet leak, but how we react to them. Being angry or sad or frustrated isn’t a failure, of course, because we are only human. Focusing only on the bad things, hating our lives, and wallowing in misery, however, only makes things WORSE. I thought for years that being jaded and cynical was a coping mechanism. In a way, it was, but it was a depressing one that only led to self-fulfilling prophecies of negative feedback and bad “luck.”

I won’t stop feeling overwhelmed just because I decide I’m not overwhelmed; my brain is too well trained. What I can do, what I’m trying to do, is change that programming through small steps. For instance, writing something, anything, instead of nothing. It almost hurts because I am so conditioned to put down my efforts as “not enough”.

The burden that overwhelms is one I picked up with my own damn hands; it is up to me to learn to carry it, and unload some of it, and handle the rest. Which I can do, as long as keep in mind that it is also my choice to change and improve my life.

IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD.

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