I try to be at least somewhat educational in these posts, if not quite so formal; learning should be fun, in my personal (and highly unpopular) opinion. Lately, I've been extremely agitated once again, thanks to a chronically distressing family life. I'm not going to get into details, for the simple reason that I prefer to keep my personal life private, though I occasionally must reference specifics in order to illustrate a point. In fact, most of you reading this probably don't even know my real name, and if you're new to my blog, you wouldn't, unless you do some digging (it's not that hard to find, by the way).
Last night was the second time that I managed to successfully drink away my problems in the span of about a month. Normally, I oppose binge drinking, but sometimes, I lose control. Stress builds up, I say to myself "one more glass of wine, then I go to bed," but instead, I end up staying up until five o'clock and drinking the whole bottle... or two... and maybe a shot... or whole cocktail glass... of 14-year-old scotch... or two, as well. Then I finally go to bed when the sun is just coming up, sleep for the entire day, and, surprisingly, don't have a massive headache when I finally roll out of bed at around sunset. Considering the success rate this has had (two for two), I think I may have finally found my own way of resetting my brain, however self-destructive it may be. Granted, I just found out that one of my friends does the exact same thing, but instead of wine, she drinks half a bottle of vodka - and she's not even Russian. Speaking of which, you know how we have BEER and quite recently, got WINE in the Hive? We need VODKA to go along with those two; after all, the three main alcohol belts in Europe are the Wine Belt, around the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, the Beer Belt, from Northern France through Central Europe and Western Poland, and the Vodka Belt, which is everywhere else. Anyway, this article is about coping with stress, not blockchain tokens, so I'm not going to go off on that tangent right now. Well, maybe one more tangent; there are some humourous maps on the internet regarding the drinking habits of various European countries, and if you want to dive in, I suggest starting with the "atlas of prejudice." It's hilarious. For example, I learned that my people are fish thieves to the Norwegians, orthodox barbarians to the Greeks, my country of origin is a gas vault according to the Germans, full of sexy chicks according to the Turks, and a weapons supermarket to India (the best part is that all five of those things are completely true).
"Don't sweat the small stuff" is something that I, a notoriously irritable person, have heard a lot. The problem, unfortunately, is that it's never just one little thing. You can't bleed to death from a paper cut (unless you're a hemophiliac, of course), but you can from about a thousand of them ("death by a thousand cuts"). Perhaps the event that sets me off, resulting in me either drinking much more heavily than normal or throwing something across the room (I actually did that only once, when I was 17, mainly because the object went through a window, which I then had to replace), isn't particularly upsetting in and of itself, it's simply the straw that broke the camel's back. To an outside observer, the response is disproportionate to the stimulus, but in all honesty, the claim of "not knowing how bad your day was" always seemed rather specious to me, particularly when coming from coworkers who know bloody well what we all put up with on a daily basis, and some people have a far shorter fuse than I do.
It ought to be quite obvious that I like tiny things. In fact, I always have. I never played with stuffed animals as a kid, but I loved dollhouses and dollhouse furniture (though I couldn't care less about the dolls themselves)... actually, I still do, but only the custom-made stuff, which is usually antique. There is a certain allure to miniatures, which my regular readers can certainly appreciate, though I recently discovered one tiny drawback that only added to my recent mental agitation. I don't have particularly steady hands, and while that has never stopped me from shooting (anything other than a flintlock, that is) straight, painting has always been something of a challenging task for me. This has bugged me for years, since I have excellent handwriting, and calligraphy was one of the many obsessions I had in my younger days. I still use my cartridge pen on occasion, but as you may suspect, I spend much more time typing than actually writing. What then, is the reason I have such a problem with painting? It bugs me, I get nervous about making a mistake, I start shaking more, and it quickly spirals out of control, so I can't paint when I'm stressed. I can't make wax part trees when I'm stressed, either, because that also requires very steady hands. Thus begins the vicious spiral, as the coping mechanism fails and adds to the mounting stress, and that's where the constructive stress reliever gives way to the self-destructive one. Perhaps a simple analogue, to illustrate the broader principle, is the desire to take a walk to relieve stress, only for the sky to let loose a torrent of rain, and so one is stuck indoors and looking for some other stress reliever... probably to be found inside a green glass bottle.
So, where am I going with this? Well, to be perfectly honest, I think people need to be open-minded about coping mechanisms, particularly self-medication. This is the reason that I jumped immediately from talking about the noisome "don't sweat the small stuff" piece of non-advice to gushing about my hobbies. One needs to have multiple options open, in case something just doesn't work, or isn't available at the moment it's needed. Returning to the subject of self-medication, I don't generally drink quickly (after all, I did nurse a 750ml wine bottle for five hours), not just because I drink to savor the flavour far more than to feel the effect of the alcohol, but also because I talk to myself. In fact, I have entire arguments with myself. I am, in some ways, my own therapist, since I have multiple personalities. Unfortunately, much like the chaos gods, they all hate each other. One part of me proposes a solution, something I can do to improve my life, but if that solution is at all contentious, another part of me will quickly shoot that idea down with some cynical, sarcastic, though usually accurate rebuttal. Rick Sanchez quotes get thrown around a lot during these sessions ("what you call love is nothing more than a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed," is a particularly common one). I think I may have revealed a bit too much regarding one of the topics that I argue with myself about... oops. Either way, it's time to put an end to this. 'Kay BYE!
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