I had a hard time sleeping last night.

Actually, I’ve had a hard time sleeping over the last more-than-a-couple of nights.

But this isn’t entirely abnormal. It’s the first thing that happens when my anxiety level is even slightly higher than usual. It’s not always something big, either–it could be something small, like, “I’m meeting someone at 11AM; I need to make sure this, this, this, and this is done first.” It snowballs from there, and like a stereotypical worrier, I wind up thinking about dozens of things I have no control over, until I meditate myself into sleep. It lasts a few hours, and then I find myself noting the time on my alarm clock every time my eyes open. 2:02. 3:45. 5:07. 6:29. This morning, it was 7:02, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting any more sleep, really. I tried unsuccessfully to take a nap around 10, but only wound up flopping around on my couch like a fish out of water, the TV babbling in the background.

There are a few things I feel anxious about–my lack of decent freelance assignments; waiting on my job-or-maybe-it-isn’t-my-job-yet-I-think-they’re-hiring-me-but-I-feel-like-they-might-rescind-the-offer-at-any-second to contact me with work to do; the fact that I have less than a month’s rent in my savings; a small road trip with my neighbors this week that I still have to pack for.

I also happened to get angry about something last night. Anyone who knows me remotely well knows that it takes a LOT to make me really angry. I get pissed off just like everyone else, but it’s rare that it’s something that sticks with me. So, this was instantly confusing, because it was a weird type of anger–really intense, and kind of rage-like. At the culmination, I felt overwrought with frustration. I felt like trashing my apartment and I had to stifle an urge to scream. But instead, I just sat there on my couch, wide-eyed and dazed, knowing there was nothing I could really do. And all I could think of was a conversation I had with my doctor in Nevada.

Dr. S.: Do you get mad often?

J: No, not really.

Dr. S.: Well, what do you do when you do get angry?

J: *Pause.* Nothing. I kind of just wait for it to go away.

Dr. S.: Really? You don’t scream or yell, or throw things, punch pillows?

J: No.

Dr. S.: Well, it’s good to get those things out. Sometimes, you really have to.

I understood what she meant, finally, even if it sounded like a simple concept I should have grasped awhile ago. But still, I did nothing, other than cry a little, which only made me angrier. I tried to distract myself with Game of Thrones, but that didn’t help too much either. SPOILER. The Hound came back – he’s one of my favorites –  and I was disappointed that I wasn’t as excited about that as I should have been.

This all sounds kind of stupid, right?

That’s what I started thinking, too. My emotions were just out-of-whack because I’ve been overly anxious. It was silly to put this much stock into something that hurt my feelings. I should just go to bed and wake up feeling better about it tomorrow.

But my brain wouldn’t shut off, even after I’d been lying in bed for more than an hour, and I kept thinking about what had made me so angry–what had really made me so angry so quickly.

When you peel everything back, it all comes down to the same issue. It’s just repeated in different ways. The one thing that upsets me the most is when my negative feelings are disregarded. I have a history with this notion–with not expressing things I should, for whatever varied reason–so when I do, it’s a bigger thing than I can explain. Maybe it all sounds silly to you, but to have those feelings dismissed, or made to be a burden, or immediately deemed irrational is like hitting the detonator. Cue implosion.

Is this a negative aspect of my personality? Like my anxiety, is this a fault? I’m not sure, but just like everything else, I have definitely overthought about it.

Maybe it stirs up a lot of insecurity, which is something I honestly try not to focus on. Maybe it makes me feel like I am not as important to people as I want to be. Maybe it makes me feel like I was right all along, and that I never should tell people things they don’t want to hear.

Maybe it makes me think that everyone knows me as someone who doesn’t get angry easily, so we can just blow this off. She’ll just get over it. She always does.

It sucks, because this is a constant. There are multiple reasons why I’ve chosen to be a bottler when it comes to emotions–some of them are still guarded by the sphinx, but others are no surprise.

And then there are other reasons why this dismissive behavior makes me so mad. Because as soon as it started happening, the first thing I wanted to do was say mean things to this person–to name call and be dismissive in return. But I didn’t, because I don’t ever go looking to say something that will purposefully hurt someone’s feelings. I try to take a second to think about what I’m going to say before I say it, so that I never have to tell someone I said something I didn’t mean.

But not everyone is like that, and maybe I should stop expecting people to behave the way I do, just because I think it’s a better way.

It also makes me angry because, almost instantaneously, I feel like I don’t have a right to be angry. Maybe not so much that I don’t have a right to be angry, but that I don’t have the right to express it. This person has done so much for me; I’m going to sound so ungrateful; he/she has so much to deal with already – do I really need to add to it?; this is going to start a fight, and then I’m going to bed knowing that someone else is upset because of me.

I’ve gotten good at recognizing cycles in my own behavior.

And I’m getting better at realizing that sometimes, something has to be done to make me feel better. It’s the reason why I’ve written so many letters to so many people–some I’ve sent; others, I never will.

But I need to get better at knowing that the behavior of other people isn’t ever really my fault, no matter how much my brain tries to convince me it is. I need to remember that I can’t control how other people behave; I can only control how I react to it.

I don’t want to say that my reaction is never wrong. My brain is going to tell me that, no matter if I’ve done the wrong or right thing. It’s always going to be a cycle, but that doesn’t mean I should pump the brakes on it altogether.

Sometimes, you do need to know if you’ve hurt my feelings. I can’t always save it for the journal, or for multiple pages wrought with everything I want to say, folded up as small as possible and hidden away somewhere in a box.

I get that you have a lot going on. I understand that maybe your life doesn’t solely belong to you, and that I just might not understand some things. I realize that things are said out of anger. I realize that anxiety gets misdirected. I don’t want to hold it against you that you’re tired or you’re not in the mood.

But sometimes, I have to come first.