Uugh I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just complaining, but I felt the need to get the words out regardless. Basically there are three emotions (or… states? At least one of them isn’t really an emotion) that I can’t reliably distinguish between when I am experiencing them. All three result in the same fluttery, roiling, twisting sensation in the stomach or solar plexus. They are: 1.) Fandom feels – caused by thinking a lot about my current obsession. Clearly, an emotion I experience frequently, and not necessarily one I want to reduce. But “my OTP is so angsty and cute it’s sickening. No, really, I feel ill,” is perhaps a little extreme, and makes me wish I knew how to dial it down a notch or three. 2.) Stress – causes include, but are not limited to: talking to people, taking tests, searching for jobs, internet drama, family drama, the future, money, people in general, and so on. Also a frequent emotion. To compound the issue, even if I've deduced that stress is the cause of the stomach upset, gooood luck guessing which thing I'm stressing about this time. 3.) Indigestion – caused by, well, bad food. Not as frequent, because I’m like, the least adventurous eater. But greasy food will do the trick, sometimes. Some days I can tell them apart based on context, but others I can’t. And then there are days like today, where it could easily be any – or all – of the three. And most likely exacerbated by the fact that it’s *ahem* “shark week.” *sigh* I think it’s getting worse though. If I’m feeling dramatic I would swear I feel this way more frequently than I feel fine, lately. ‘S probably stress, what with the whole “OMG how do I grown up?” issue really coming to a head in the past months. Bleh. Do not want.
I'm not sure if I have any specific advice sadly, but I'm just heartily amused because my first response to reading this was 'did i accidentally create a sub and type and post this without realising it?' Spoiler Seriously I'm on shark week too even About the only thing I don't feel you on is being an unadventurous eater. So, uh, have some sympathy, at least.
I find it helpful to consider that people tend to translate their more challenging emotions into one of three generalized expressions: anxiety, fear or anger. For me it's anxiety. It's sort of an emotional shorthand, but it makes it hard to figure out that, for instance, one is feeling anxious when at the root the situation at hand is actually scary or infuriating, so it gets hard to figure out how to actually react. It also tends to repeatedly center one's physical reactions into particular bodily areas in a way that wears on them. So, it might help to consciously mull over the scariness of sharks and to picture yourself actually using that adrenaline to fully engage your limbs to swim to safety, or the infuriating nature of drama and to picture yourself actually using that adrenaline to fully engage your brain in order to eloquently tell the offenders a thing or two. That sort of saves your anxiety for things like "OMG how do I grown up?" Anxiety roils because it has to do with things that are really complex and it is harder to set one's mind on a specific action. I like to sit down at the keyboard to brainstorm with myself. I write down every aspect of the situation that comes to me. Sort of pin that roiling mass down into a list of declarative sentences. Once I feel done I group them. Then I try to think of at least one action I can take for each statement. By "can take" I mean that I, myself am constitutionally able to perform that action. Even it it's tiny, because even one tiny step may lead to the next. (For instance, if Finding Housing seems too dauntingly complicated, I can at least run a search on local apartments and and bookmark a site or two.) If I can't think of a doable step for something I skip to the next statement. Then I pick one action--an easy one--and begin.
(Sorry for the late reply - spoons were hard to come by for a while.) @TwoBrokenMirrors It's good even just to know I'm not the only one. *solidarity fistbumps* @Ink Huh, that's an interesting way of looking at it, with the translating emotions into one of three categories thing. There's a character I write sometime who I had conceptualized as doing that with anger, but it hadn't occurred to me to connect that to my own issues with anxiety. And the list suggestion sounds helpful! I'll definitely try that. Thank you!
As far as indigestion goes: a lot of people, particularly when they don't have the spoons or context or space to work out their emotions, get physical symptoms from strong emotions. Panic attacks are a very extreme form of this. I've personally experienced stomach issues when in a state of high anxiety. Less powerful but chronic moods can create chronic symptoms. And while I'm not sure if there's science behind this, my general observation has been that if someone's going to develop psychosomatic issues, it's with a thing their body tends to fuck up anyway. I have generally bad skin (skin allergies, acne well into my 20s, occasional flares of psoriasis, way more skin infections than anyone else I have ever known), and I sometimes break out in hives for no discernable reason or have a psorasis flare when I've been stressed out. So you might be having trouble distinguishing indigestion from this other stuff because the other stuff is triggering indigestion, not because the indigestion is an entirely separate thing.
