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Jul. 22nd, 2014 07:18 amLast night was the first night I spent without company in the new place. It was...strange.
I grew up relatively poor, and I'm not exactly wealthy now, but I can afford a standard of living that I haven't had in a long time, in terms of the size and quality of my home. This apartment is so nice and in such a good place and has so many cool little features that it makes me really nervous. I'm afraid that there's some hidden flaw in the place, or (realistically; it's at the upper end of my rent window) that I won't be able to afford it long term, that I'll be fired and won't be able to afford it at all (unrealistic; I'm good at my job, I haven't done anything to deserve it) or that something terrible will happen as a sort of supernatural retribution. I suspect some of this has to do with undergoing a major personal upheaval in my family when I was eleven -- going from safety to instability in more or less a heartbeat -- but some of it is brain chemistry.
It's terrible to live with mental illness sometimes, of course, but for me some of the terrible is the amount of superstition that goes into my life. If I do X or Y, I'll get result Z, at least I believe, even if X and Y AND Z are unrelated. When you live like that, if something goes wrong, even if it realistically wasn't in your control, it still feels as though it's your fault. I try to break as much of the habit as I can, but I still free-floating worry that because I feel secure and stable (and because I talk about it) something awful is about to happen to make up for it.
I spent a significant portion of yesterday afternoon reading Crowded House, one of the Top 25 New Yorker Free Articles from Longform.org. It's about a disastrous attempt by a hundred different people to sublet one apartment from a scam artist, and what they went through trying to get their money back. Then I had to stop, because I was working myself up into some kind of state.
Everything will be fine. The appliances work, the apartment is price-appropriate, and if something breaks I'm capable of fixing it (I've already fixed the showerhead). I have earned what I have, and while luck may have helped, I put in the work so that it could. I'm just going to keep telling myself that until I believe it.
I grew up relatively poor, and I'm not exactly wealthy now, but I can afford a standard of living that I haven't had in a long time, in terms of the size and quality of my home. This apartment is so nice and in such a good place and has so many cool little features that it makes me really nervous. I'm afraid that there's some hidden flaw in the place, or (realistically; it's at the upper end of my rent window) that I won't be able to afford it long term, that I'll be fired and won't be able to afford it at all (unrealistic; I'm good at my job, I haven't done anything to deserve it) or that something terrible will happen as a sort of supernatural retribution. I suspect some of this has to do with undergoing a major personal upheaval in my family when I was eleven -- going from safety to instability in more or less a heartbeat -- but some of it is brain chemistry.
It's terrible to live with mental illness sometimes, of course, but for me some of the terrible is the amount of superstition that goes into my life. If I do X or Y, I'll get result Z, at least I believe, even if X and Y AND Z are unrelated. When you live like that, if something goes wrong, even if it realistically wasn't in your control, it still feels as though it's your fault. I try to break as much of the habit as I can, but I still free-floating worry that because I feel secure and stable (and because I talk about it) something awful is about to happen to make up for it.
I spent a significant portion of yesterday afternoon reading Crowded House, one of the Top 25 New Yorker Free Articles from Longform.org. It's about a disastrous attempt by a hundred different people to sublet one apartment from a scam artist, and what they went through trying to get their money back. Then I had to stop, because I was working myself up into some kind of state.
Everything will be fine. The appliances work, the apartment is price-appropriate, and if something breaks I'm capable of fixing it (I've already fixed the showerhead). I have earned what I have, and while luck may have helped, I put in the work so that it could. I'm just going to keep telling myself that until I believe it.
