Day 178: Feeling discouraged, what helps, and voicemail messages

On Day 17 of this year, I wrote about feeling “uneasy” when I woke up in the morning. I wondered how I would feel waking up in later months, like May or November.

During this week in June, I have been waking up some mornings feeling discouraged and overwhelmed.

There are things I can do to help relieve that feeling, including:

1. Make sure I have something to eat (see here).
2. Identify the challenges I’m dealing with.
3. Complain, moan, vent or otherwise indulge in being pissed off about some aspect of those challenges.
4. Identify at least ONE helpful, achievable action, which is within my control.
5. Let go of judgment about how well I’m doing, dealing with all this.

Now, I could — to make this a more “useful” post — give you examples of each and every one of those things I just listed above. (And, I HAVE done each of those things since waking up early this morning. And, yes, they all helped.)

However, what would be more fun for me right now would be to show you an example of just #3 — that is, the complaining portion of the festivities.

Okay!

Here is one of my pet peeves:

People who, when they leave you a phone message, rush through their phone numbers, without repeating them, so you have to listen to the friggin’ message several times to get it.

Arrrghhhh!!!!

This has been driving me up the wall for years, and it’s been happening A LOT recently.

For the purposes of this rant, I am going to address you like you are one of those people who do that egregious thing — leave numbers too quickly on a phone message.

In therapy, we call this a “role play.” If you never, ever leave your phone number quickly on a message, recognize that I am not really yelling at you. Treat this as a “dramatization.”

Here we go …

HEY! COULD YOU POSSIBLY TAKE ANOTHER FRIGGIN’ SECOND OR TWO AND LEAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER A LITTLE MORE SLOWLY AND CLEARLY ON MY VOICEMAIL?

HOW ABOUT THIS? COULD YOU AT LEAST SAY YOUR PHONE NUMBER AT THE SAME RATE AS YOU SAID THE REST OF YOUR FRIGGIN’ MESSAGE? INSTEAD OF FRIGGIN’ SPEEDING UP WHEN YOU SAY THE NUMBER?

LOOK, YOU KNOW YOUR OWN NUMBER, AND — YES! — I AM SURE YOU ARE BORED BY IT, BUT I DON’T KNOW IT, OKAY?, I NEED A FRIGGIN’ MOMENT TO CATCH UP! NUMBERS ARE NOT MY NATIVE LANGUAGE, OKAY?

(pant, pant, pant)

I shudder to think how much of my life I have spent, listening and re-listening to phone numbers, trying to get them right, so I can call people back.

Not the best pie chart, but I didn’t want to waste any more time on this.

Okay, now I feel better.

Thanks for reading, everybody.