I spent most of yesterday morning and the day before worrying about things, mostly relating to my annual insurance physical. My doctor is sort of the general-practitioner equivalent of a student teacher—he sees his own patients, but he's still in med school. He's not like a first-year or anything, but I used his inexperience to my advantage when I asked for my HRT referral. Fortunately, he didn't come into it with any personal biases and referred me to a new place in ████████, but that was last year. I had somehow convinced myself that, in the intervening time, he took some kind of class on "Evangelism in the exam room" and would somehow gain the authority to de-prescribe some or all of my HRT. Of course that didn't happen. In fact, my blood pressure was normal, I didn't suddenly shrink by half a metre, I even lost 25 pounds! I walked out of there feeling better about myself than I had in days. Heck, I even got my oestrogen prescription increased at my quarterly follow-up at the gender care clinic!
But, that's just me, isn't it? In all things, I plan for 500 different ways to fail without ever considering that I might succeed. And those 500 ways to fail, 498 of them are completely imaginary, 483 of them aren't even possible under Newtonian physics. It's a tired and predictable old gavotte that I play everytime I need to do something, and I'm getting sick of it. I work myself into what my mum called yesterday a "nervous wreck" for no apparent reason. Even when I don't have anything to do, I still plan for failure.
So now, all my appointments are done and I'm sitting here at my computer, no deadlines or schedules of any kind (well, except for February, which is when I've got to release Myshuno, part II). Nonetheless, I'm still worried about things! My brain continues to invent situations to be depressed about, continues forcing me to question my very existence, and I'm eating it up like a Tucker Carlson fan.
I don't need to plan for success necessarily, I just need to stop planning for failure. Even though I've been telling myself that for most of 20 years at this point with no apparent effect, maybe this time it'll work. Anyway, I'll come up with something more interesting to write later.
--21 June 2024--