Dealing with the down time

I attempted to start writing a witty post about my big pantry-restocking grocery store trip last night, my first in about two months, and how my mom keeps making fun of me for avoiding it, but I just couldn't do it.

There's a reason for both my inability to write and my aversion to grocery shopping.

I know I've told y'all that I've been doing better lately -- and I am. It's not a lie. I've been as happy as can be when I've been hanging out with friends, going out to lunch or dancing my feet off.

But there's a flipside to that. When I'm by myself, which is starting to be a bit more of a regular thing, it's hard to keep my brain from wanting to sink itself. I can't read or watch TV without my mind wandering, and it only takes one little spark of a thought to set it off and BOOM! I'll be thinking about what I'm going to do for lunch and all of a sudden it's occurring to me that I no longer have that one person who really cares whether or not I've had lunch yet and then I'm stressing about the fact that I'm sitting there by myself and then I'm panicking with the thought that this is the way the rest of my life will be because I'll never find anyone who wants to share their life or their lunch with me.

And I know these thoughts are ridiculous, but that doesn't stop them from happening. All it does is scare me that this break up could get the better of me. And frustrate me for being anything other than the happy person I want to be. It's a vicious cycle, and for someone who usually is a pretty confident and happy person, the newfound insecurity is a bitter pill to swallow.

I also know I have friends I can reach out to, but when you're in a down state like that it's hard to force yourself to do that. I've tried to keep myself as busy as possible to keep it from getting to that point, but despite how happy it makes me to be with people right now I also find it exhausting. I turned down an invitation from a guy whose company I've really come to enjoy to head out to one of my favorite bars tonight. Why on Earth? Probably because I was already into the panic mode from being alone at work all day and wasn't sure I had the energy to pull myself out of it. I tried some retail therapy instead. I lasted about 10 minutes in one of my favorite stores without being interested in a single thing.

And just like I've struggled to keep the negative thoughts in check and I struggled to get my Christmas tree down, I had a hard time forcing myself to go grocery shopping, no matter how many times I said I was going. It had nothing to do with the actual act of grocery shopping -- we hardly ever did that together. It was the idea that all those great meals he's cooked for me in the past year will be no longer and by grocery shopping I'm acknowledging that life is moving on.

The dog isn't helping. I swear her emotional state is mirroring my own. There were a couple of days where she only got out of bed to eat and go for a walk -- not that sleeping for 23 hours is that unusual for her, but she does usually relocate to the couch for about half of that time and take a break to terrorize a squeaky toy. She can't figure out for her life why one of her humans seems to be missing.

I don't really know how to fix these things. I know I need the downtime to recover, I just can't seem to keep the downtime from becoming a really, really down time.