When I got home from bootcamp on Saturday I was telling Renee, my roommate, some of what I learned last week. We did this exercise where you basically identify stories you tell yourself in order to keep yourself in a fog. I told her that I have two basic responses which are sequential to any given situation which results in my unhappiness. The first is "I'm helpless". This is me where I'm a little confused, and I don't know the answer and I scramble to figure it out but am blocked. When that doesn't solve the problem, and it never does, I turn to "f*&ck this - I don't need this." The former hands off to the latter with seamless transition.
So tonight I'm doing my expense report which I've ignored since my Tokyo trip because the receipts are in, well, Japanese, and I can't even tell if they're right-side-up, much less how much or what they're for, and I'm sitting here, an hour into it, getting really frustrated. I start off telling her that I don't even know what the receipts are for and I don't know how I'm going to figure it out. She snickers and says "Dude just finish it." One more hour passes by, I've now entered a total of four receipts out of the thirty I have to report, and I say "I don't even care if I get paid for these stupid receipts. It's not worth it anyway." She snickers again. She then gets up and says she's going to bed which is bullshit b/c I'm the one w/ the earlier meeting in the morning. So she walks over to her bedroom, barely able to contain her little laughs.
"Dude, WHAT is so funny?" I asked. She answers with "I just think it's funny that in the course of you doing your expense report you've done both of those things you said you do -- first you were the victim with 'I don't understand this' and then you were pissed and said you didn't care if you got reimbursed or not which is just saying 'f this'." She went on, because I think she thought I might still be in confusion. "I mean, even in something so basic as an expense report you do those things (meaning the stories I tell myself)."
And this is the problem with sharing.