My Anxiety - Doechii

 1 Dialectical Behavioral Therapy ? 

Recently my therapist has been trying to push something on me. Dialectical behavioral therapy. She has been suggesting that I come to the dialectical behavior therapy group for weeks, and I've been telling her I already go to so many therapies that I am running out of the ability to keep track of when I'm going to them. So I told her I'd think about it. 

The concept of dialectical behavior therapy intrigues me though. My therapist told me there were many different techniques and skills involved in dialectical behavior therapy, one of them being radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is the concept (I think?) of radically accepting things in your life as true, even if or especially when you don't want to accept them. An example of this is me with my anxiety, like radically accepting that I have anxiety, and accepting it when it does come up. 

But I think more than things like radical acceptance and mindfulness, I'm interested in dialectical behavioral therapy because it involves the word "dialectical", which is a word I first heard of when I went to liberal arts college in 2015-2016. The dialectic is a concept written by German philosopher Hegel. I think it is the concept that ideas and their contradictions don't necessarily have to be opposing and cancelling each other out, but can resolve each other through the dialectical method of thinking. I think then Marx used this concept of dialectic and applied it to history, the opposing forces throughout history. 

I've never actually read Hegel, partially because I feel like if I'm not reading it in German there's no point (my excuse), but this idea really resonates with me. The idea that an idea (thesis) and its contradiction (antithesis) can be combined through synthesis really intrigues me. A synthesis of thesis and antithesis. I feel like this resonates with me because I often have contradictory thoughts. (I think this is why radical acceptance is part of dialectical behavior therapy too. In a way you're accepting seemingly contradictory thoughts. ex: I don't like my anxiety, but I accept my anxiety and even can learn to appreciate my anxiety).

I often have contradictory thoughts, and I also often regret decisions that I make, almost immediately after I make them. An example of this is the simple act of eating a strawberry. I open the refrigerator, see that there's a strawberry in there that I could eat. A reasonable person would just reach in there and eat the strawberry. But for some reason, after eating the strawberry, sometimes I'm like "why did I eat the strawberry, I should have eaten something else, or have not eaten anything at all."

Radical acceptance, as my therapist may have put it, would be like, "Okay, I accept that I ate the strawberry. What now?" Which may appear on the surface to be somewhat surly. 

I think, and this is just pure conjecture, but I think Hegel in his dialectic would have said, the act of you eating the strawberry and you not eating the strawberry is a dialectic which would have only been resolved with the act of eating the strawberry. You can resolve these two opposing desires by acknowledging the two opposing forces, and subsume your desire into a synthesized desire and act, which leads to a consummation of the act against the act. In this way the thesis, eating the strawberry, and antithesis, not eating the strawberry, are synthesized into a new concept-idea.

I am just making sh*t up at this point lmao. But you get the point. I lowkey have "anxiety" sometimes.

2 Parasocial relationships to people on social media ? 

This is kind of off-topic, but I suppose it's on topic by virtue of being in this very same blogpost as the headings above and below. I saw a TikTok by a guy that I follow who is a white boy at UCLA who makes Chinese content about him learning Chinese. His name is "Leo" and I will update with a link to his page as soon as I feel like it...

He made a TikTok talking about his Chinese textbooks, and how he had a "parasocial" relationship to them. That expanded my view lowkey on what is considered as parasocial. Apparently I can not only have parasocial relationships to people. I can have parasocial relationships with objects, too. I have a parasocial relationship to my shoes, my phone, each book I own, the bathroom, the bathroom wall I'm facing whenever I pee...I think parasocial in this instance is anything or one you encounter on a daily basis to the point where it feels like you're starting to develop a relationship to it. 

So in the same way, I have many parasocial relationship to my oomfs on instagram. Not saying y'all are objects...And an oomf is anyone I see on the internet who I feel like I have a relationship with, not just my actual followers. Although that iOS the apparent definition of it. 

Maybe I'm lonely, but that doesn't feel like it either. I don't become familiar with the walls I live in out of loneliness. I think it has to do with consistency. Facing the same people and things everyday gives a sense of consistency which is both necessary and comforting. I think there must be some cognitive thing that lights up when you see the same people everyday. I think that's why high school was so tea, it was the social aspect of being around the same people at the same time everyday. 

Of course there's also the attendant argument that social media can lead to a sense of being eternally in high school. This can be true, in more ways than one. There's the fact that people you became mutuals with in high school stay mutuals forever, leading to a sense that high school is never over. Then there is the social stratifying sense, that social media's sense of popularity, drama, cliques, and friendship is similar to high school. 

And to all that blather, I say "phooey"~! I think school of any kind is tea. If I had it my way, I would stay in school forever. #Stay. #In. #School. And that's the tea on that. I don't know. Am I supposed to connect this back to "my anxiety" somehow? This isn't a school essay. I think it would be tea if we all just stayed in school, just without the grades. Like a meeting place where we could all go to take classes and discuss things. That would be tea. 

3 "Anxiety" and ~*Anxiety*~

I think there is an attendant difference between "Anxiety" and ~*Anxiety*~ write large. Anxiety lol. That's what I meant. But I'll just keep using ~*Anxiety*~ because that's what I used in my writing process originally, before I had the thought that I was trying to bold the text. They mean the same thing, really. 

I feel like "Anxiety", when people use it like "I was having anxiety about whether to eat the strawberries" (to go back to the earlier example) is kind of like, maybe overthinking. Or being indecisive, or something like that. Like "I was having a lot of anxiety about going to grad school" or "This assignment was lowkey giving me anxiety". It's kind of like a different feeling, but a feeling nonetheless, from what I think of as ~*Anxiety*~. Or like Anxiety writ large. 

In my own personal experiénce, Anxiety is a somatic experience, resplendent with a somewhat depressive tint and a heavy thought pattern and things like heart palpitations and inability to close eyes. This is just my own individual experience. But like we've discussed in group therapy on Wednesday, everybody experiences anxiety differently. But then, if everyone experiences it differently, then who's to say who really has Anxiety and who is just experiencing a sort of cognitive overload? 

I feel like there's the same thing with depression. I feel like some people throw around the word "I'm so depressed" when they mean like they are feeling kind of tired or low. But then there's the kind of depression that my man David Foster Wallace described as feeling sick in every fiber of your being, like sick to the point where each cell in your body feels sick, and each cell within your cells feels sick, like you want to throw up but you can't. I don't know if I could profess to ever experience this extreme level of depression, but I do think that, yes there is a somatic element of depression that is not just a simple cognitive experience of being depressed. 

Maybe I'm just invalidating other people's tea because I feel invalidated lately. I feel like I always feel invalidated. Good thing I'm not a parking ticket. *b'dum tsss*. But seriously, when I feel Anxiety I literally feel like something is really, really wrong and something extremely bad is going to happen. Not like, I can't decide whether I want to eat this strawberry, but more like, I can't tell where I'm going to end up in the next hour. *Trying to phrase things without raising concerns by anyone*. 

But it lowkey is tea that everyone experiences things differently. Like, the thing where I can tell you I have pain, but I can't show you what that pain feels like. I can only point in the general direction, or give you a number from 1-10, but no matter how good my powers of explanation are, I can't make you feel my pain. Empathy only works up to a certain extent. And that's just the way the cookie crumbles. I find that slang terms like "tea" make me more prone to using funny expressions like "that's just the way the cookie crumbles". 

And that concludes today's rant folks.