Waiting flu

Let me tell you a story.

Anhedonia is sometimes conceived as one big thing- the inability or reduced ability to experience pleasure from activities that would normally be pleasurable. The thing is, absent certain brain injuries, people do not experience this with every experience. There are some notable distinctions. In particular, this muted pleasure response can relate to the anticipation of future pleasurable things, or the period of consummation. There are definitely aspects of both in how I experience the world- consummatory anhedonia explains my pretty lukewarm view of sex absent hypersexuality. What I most notice these days is the brutal, grinding, joyless process of waiting.

I remember being excited with waiting growing up; we have just passed Christmas and the days leading up to it were so exciting. I was interested in decorating, music, looking at lights. The excitement of the day itself made the totality more vivid. Over the years, the anticipation has turned into grey sludge, and the waiting began making me somewhat unwell. Waiting for holidays, vacations, friends coming into town is exhausting, I feel nauseous. It's not that I don't want these things to happen, it's that by the time they do I'm beyond bandwidth and I just want it all to be over with.

Thus in the past few years, the social experiences I actually like tend to be made on very short notice. With one of my friends this means "can you be ready in twenty minutes, I'll get in the car" level of prep. We have issues with lack of prep- you can't go to a Japanese garden if all the reservations were taken days ago. That said, it works well enough. The thing is, very few people can actually do this- it's a function of a very specific person with availability and also a fondness for me and us.

I end up a couple short steps from insistent, trying to make things happen on the timeline I can handle. I worry that if I don't offer up things to do, we will never do anything. The many times I have moved, I lose touch with friends because we don't have enough contact. This reads as pressure, and it's hard to argue it's not. I also don't know any other way to operate. I feel like I am both too accommodating with people but also asking for anything is a trespass.

I don't know what to do, other than write this and puzzle through it next week before therapy. I feel like I'm being punished by people trying to do their best, and I feel like if I don't have the reassurance of borderline strangers I can''t keep it together.

I don't believe people are broken. I do think I did the IKEA instructions wrong and will have to work backwards to figure out where this wooden pegs are supposed to go.

Artemis