justaoifethings

On Friday, I went to a therapy session. Both my therapist and I are pretty visual, so we decided to do a visual mental exercise. He asked me to imagine that I was in a forest, and I to imagine that I saw an animal. When discussing it, it turned out it was an exercise about being present. This is something I find hard to do, and wrote a blog post the first time I realised I was doing it. This feeling of being anywhere but in the now is a pretty common symptom of anxiety. For me, though, it had gone far beyond spacing out and not thinking about anything. My therapist asked me what qualities are necessary to be present, and I was stumped. I was never in the present. It was really rare, and for the longest time, I thought that everyone thought like me. I was always in the future, or the past, and this caused me to get anxious. Even if I was thinking about something positive, I would quickly think of all the problems that could come with it, which caused me to be anxious. I'm in a lo