things that activate my adrenal gland
- anger
There's someone in the next row of benches over from me who often explodes into anger when something goes wrong. If an experiment doesn't work, or she spills something, she stomps around swearing repeatedly. Every time, I cringe and stare fixedly at whatever's in front of me, hoping desperately that she won't look my way and start yelling at me. Even though whatever went wrong has nothing to do with me (we're not even in the same lab), I still feel guilty, as if I should have prevented it, or should be helping fix it.
People sometimes laugh at how I always stay calm, even after I've completely ruined an experiment that’s taken me ages to set up. I've had people steal my booking on a piece of equipment, after I've travelled for an hour to get into lab by 8am and then spent an hour or two setting up my experiment with expensive reagents and I still won't do more than send a polite self-disparaging email. When I was 18 (legal Commonwealthian drinking age), an underage friend asked to borrow my ID. I refused, but then gave in when she asked to just take it to class to prove to a pressuring friend that we looked nothing alike. After she'd avoided meeting up with me to give it back for over a week, she called in the middle of the night to say she'd had it confiscated while trying to use it to get into a nightclub and I still ended up comforting her when she burst into tears at how bad she felt.
I'm not even sure if I'm actually angry or not in situations like these. I tell myself it's just not worth getting angry over and sometimes that's genuinely how I feel. I can become enraged with myself over simple mistakes if I'm already feeling miserable, though.
- requests for help
On the weekend, I heard one of my housemates and her boyfriend coming up the stairs. When they were almost at the top, my housemate said “oh, honey, could you bring the other bag up from the car, please?” and I was immediately panic-stricken, because you can’t just ask someone to do something you’re perfectly capable of doing yourself, can you?
- doorbells/telephones ringing
I always wish I could just hide. I usually wait long enough to give everyone else in the house a chance to answer it first. In lab, when I’m sitting closest to the phone, that’s hard to do, but I often try to pretend I’m just finishing typing something vitally important. It helps that it’s never for me.
- the sound of a car pulling into the driveway
This still makes me panic and mentally run through a list of what I should have done before someone gets home and catches me reading/online without having done the one simple thing I was asked to do.
posted by Lucy @ 9:25 PM
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comments
6 Comments:
I understand some of these. My personal trigger is the mail. I instantly worry that there will be some horrible information about how I didn't pay ANY BILLS for YEARS and how I'm going to go to jail. Even if I know that I paid that particular bill last month, I still panic and I almost never open my mail right away.
Also, hearing my boss walk through the lab when he's in that mood where he want to talk to everyone and see what we're up to. I usually try and think of a reason to leave before he makes it over to me.
Me totally too. All of them, except for the car pulling into the driveway.
I don't really remember ever being more than mildly annoyed about things, (well, upset, yes, but not angry), so I find it hard to understand rage in others. Maybe people like you and me are just lucky in having landed a calm personality, but I suspect it's more about turning anger into something else because deep down we feel it's not allowed.
For me it's partly related to the fact that both my parents fly off the handle at the smallest things. Dropping the milk could lead to a half-hour long storm of stomping around and swearing. And my father's depression has always manifested itself through extreme periods of being angry at everything rather than through sadness. Which I always found so stressful that I'm sure I subconsciously try not to be that way myself, and maybe I overdo it.
Do you think that it's things from your childhood that cause you to feel the ways you describe here?
I actually love mail, betty, because you can always ignore it or throw it away if it's something bad. I can understand the avoid people who want to check up on you, too.
Styley, I don't know if my parents (my mum mostly, since my dad was just largely absent/invisible) got angry too easily, but my mum and older brother had frequent shouting matches, starting from when he was very young and I would try to hide or do something "good", like fold the washing, so that she wouldn't notice me, or if she did, I wouldn't be doing anything that could possibly provoke her when she was already upset (it didn't help protect me from my brother's resentment, though). I'm not sure how much of that was actually worrying about getting yelled at, and how much was feeling bad for her because of whatever my brother had said/done and not wanting to make her feel worse. I really hated listening to arguments over pedantic little things that were completely beside the point, where I wanted to shake them and tell them to stop antagonising each other over nothing. So, I think that definitely makes me think about whether it's worth getting angry over something and it almost never seems to be.
I would actually get angry and yell at my brother when he broke something of mine, yet again, but I'd often get told off by a parent for reacting and therefore encouraging him, so I guess I learnt it wasn't worth it there, too.
The confusing part about avoidance is that I don't usually bitch about it in private, either (except to have something to talk about, if other people are complaining). Hmm, is whingeing/whining the same? I do plenty of that. I don't know if I'm just avoiding having to admit to feeling any anger to myself, as well.
I hate that caller ID doesn't work for international calls, so I can't screen calls from my family.
My huge avoidance is the phone--even when I know it's people I like, I still really hate answering the phone. GB, who is less avoidy than I am--by far--is totally phobic about mail. Hard to figure out why certain things set us off...
One of mine--a total leftover from childhood--is that moment when guests leave or we're leaving a party or something...I always get anxious, waiting to be told I made some huge social mistake.
I *never* answer the phone anymore. Even if it's someone I wouldn't mind talking to, the idea of having to be "on" for someone with no previous notice just exhausts me. I feel much the same about the doorbell.
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