Day 162: Snow!

Snow outside my office.

This isn't the first snow of the season, but it's the first snow I captured on my camera.  It only lasted 20 minutes or so, and it didn't stick (awesome!), so I was pretty lucky to get a few shots in the middle of a work day.

I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed with life lately.  There are too many details to keep track of at work, and at home...and just as it usually does, my brain doesn't have enough hard drive space to fit it all, so it starts deleting random data.

(That's geek talk for, "I'm forgetting a lot of stuff lately.")

The problem is, my brain doesn't drop useless trivia (like the address of the home I grew up in), or unpleasant memories (like my worst first date, or that time in high school when I threw a huge party and no one showed up).  No, it drops important things, like the due date on my credit card bill, or a time-sensitive phone call I was supposed to make last week.

And with all this "data dumping" that my brain keeps doing, all it does is add to the stress of each day, instead of easing it.  Because I notice whenever my brain drops something.  Suddenly I get a pit in my stomach and a feeling of unease and I realize I'm missing something but I can't remember what.  So then I stress out trying to remember what it was, meanwhile forgetting even more important stuff and missing even more deadlines.

It's a deadly spiral.

Luckily, I know how to get out of it.  It's just really hard to do in this state of near-panic.  The solution is to stop thinking and start working.  I just need to pick up the next thing on my to-do list and start doing it, regardless of what else I'm not doing or what other deadlines are hanging over my head.  But man, is that tough to do!  I can't accurately explain just how difficult it is do just ignore the stress cloud hanging over my head.  It's a battle I'm constantly fighting all day.

It will go away eventually.  Once I've ticked off enough items on my to-do list that it doesn't feel overwhelming anymore, the stress cloud will disperse and my brain will stop doing random data dumps.

Until then, I just have to keep on keepin' on!