an admission

My sister Jenney loves Dr Phil.  She actually almost got to go on his show recently after writing the good doc a letter about her kid's constant arguing.  Sadly, it turned out that their family just couldn't make it to the studio on such short notice, so they didn't go on.  She would have died.  Jenney loves Dr. Phil.  So she has a lot of Dr Phil-isms that she always comes out with, and really, they are very sensible.  My sister Jen is a person with about the most common sense of anyone I know -- AND she gives good advice and doesn't just feed you a line of what you want to hear, which is something I truly value in a person.  Anyway, I pretty rarely turn the TV on during the day and I only catch Dr Phil every so often, so I rely on Jenney to come out with those cool words of wisdom as needed.

One thing that Jen (Dr. Phil) says often is "fake it til you make it."

It makes me think of being a kid, and my mom telling us to slap a smile on our faces and eventually we'd feel better if we were unhappy.

It does work in many respects.  If you're down, but you're making an effort to keep smiling, most of the time you just start feeling happier --  it is hard to be crabby and down in the dumps when you're smiling.  Really.  You should try it.

If I want to be honest, I have to say that I "fake it" a lot of the time because I have these dumb anxieties.  I never really recognized it in myself, in fact, I often got on my sister Ali's case for being such a worrier, but it totally affects me every day.  I hate it.   It's mostly social anxiety, and dumb irrational thinking, but man - I just don't know how to turn that "voice inside" off sometimes.

I'm pretty sure I have pinpointed when it all started, and I keep coming back to several years ago when my Meggie was only about 12 months old.  Here's the rational part: I've always considered myself a good driver, very competent - felt that I had business on the road, you know.  One day, I saw a clip on the news that showed a person falling out the back door of a car on a highway during a cop chase.  It was a pretty gruesome clip, graphically showing the person literally bouncing on the road.  Awful images.

I could not stop thinking about that clip.  I was actually dreaming about it.  I drove a rockin' Expedition at the time, and it was kind of high up on the road.  It was a very safe car, but every time I got in and drove out of town, I would panic at the thought of one of my kids falling out.  That was the irrational part.  I just kept seeing this image of one of my babies falling and hitting the ground, like the clip.  Seriously, I know it sounds freaking weird, but it was awful.  If a passenger so much as cracked a window, it would make my heart drop, because it sounded like the door was opening.   This mostly happened if I had kids in the car, and it definitely seemed worse at night.

And you know, rationally, I knew it would be highly unlikely that such a thing would actually happen to me.  But it made me question my skills as a driver, made me nervous driving anywhere on the highway, made me sometimes have to pull over to take a few minutes to chill out.  On many occasions, I considered calling my husband to just come get me.  Out of sheer embarrassment at acting like such a dummy, I'd forced myself back on the road and talk myself home.

(I tried to make this look cooler than it actually is)

I actually had to trade the car in, and it did help some.  Now I drive a super cool mini-van.  Yeehaw!  I have no idea what the difference is, but I haven't had a panic attack behind the wheel of this car in ages.  Hmph.

SORRY!  I really wasn't going to go into such depth about this one particular anxiety. I pretty much keep my issues to myself and "fake it til I make it," let's all just be thankful I stopped at that one long-winded admission...

So what do you all freak out about?