100th post

Well, this is my 100th post here, and I'm sad to admit I just don't have a whole lot to say today.

I feel like I've come a long way since I started here in October, healing-wise, but I also feel like I still have a long way to go. I suspect I will never make it that remaining distance back to the person I was. What has struck me lately is how much of my own sense of self-worth was historically caught up in my work (and in school before that). I am not someone who is outwardly competitive; for me, the competition has always been with myself and with my sense of my abilities. Since September, I have let a lot of that go. (And lest anyone think that sounds healthy, it's not. The alternative has been putting that same value on my abilities to conceive and carry a child, which is something I suspect I have far less control over, making my self-worth very dependent on what feels like chance.)

I always thought that if I were able to do that -- let go of work as the thing to which I attached value -- it would likely be for better, but thus far it hasn't been. I spend a lot of my time consumed by anxiety, terrified that someone will notice how little I've accomplished lately and kick me to the curb. In a profession in which I am valued only partly for the quality of my work, in which more of my value is assigned to the quantity and to the dollars that work brings in, my anxiety isn't really unfounded. It's starting to get very real, and I'm starting to realize that the part of me that placed a lot of my sense of self-worth in my work is starting to come back to life. Because if I didn't, I'm not sure how much I'd really care.

I keep telling myself that I need to pull it together, to really buckle down, but I can't, or, more accurately, I won't. Part of it is that I need a lot more work to do. But I do have things to do, I just can't seem to motivate to do them. Each week I say that this week will be different. Today, I will say it again. This week will be different. I will go to work tomorrow and tr harder to focus. If nothing else, I need the income.