Day 280: No Worries, Part Deux

Exactly 39 days ago, I wrote a post called No worries. If I do say so myself, it was a good post.  And other people seemed to like it, too.

What are you waiting for?  Go check it out by clicking on that link above.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Okay.

Yes, I wanted to re-visit that post today, because, frankly, during the past week, I lost track of the lessons of that post.

In other words, I’ve been worried.  My mind has been doing this:

Even though I believed it, when I wrote 39 days ago, that worry doesn’t help us,  I still circled back into worry, this past week.

(Psssst! If you’ve ever lost track of a previously learned lesson, see another previous post — called “The Ascending Coil” —  for a perhaps helpful “reframe” of the perhaps unhelpful concepts of “backsliding” and “losing ground.”)

So where was I, before the aside in parentheses?

Oh, yes, I was going to re-cap some facts, to explain why I “backslid” into worry last week:

1. Last week, I was surprised by a new development with my unusual heart. I went into atrial fibrillation, where I will most likely stay, for the rest of my life.
2. As a result of #1, I will need to take medication (to counteract the increased risk of stroke) for the rest of my life.
3. When unexpected changes happen, my first reaction is often to  catastrophize — a cognitive distortion I seem to share with many other human beings.  (For definitions of catastrophizing and other common cognitive distortions, click here.)
4. While I actually like certain kinds of surprises (e.g., I’d LOVE somebody to be clever enough to succeed in surprising me with a party, some day), other kinds of surprises make me cranky.  And when I’m cranky, I tend to worry more.

I think those four reasons, above,  are enough to explain why it sucked to be me, last week.

Actually, I don’t think it actually sucked to be me, at least not completely.  In ways, it was wonderful to be me, last week.

I’ve just always wanted to say that:  “It sucked to be me.”   And I haven’t said (or written that) before, until now.

Okay! I don’t know about you, but I‘ve gotten a lot out of this blog post,  already, including these benefits:

1. I got to boss around my readers, insisting that they look at a previous blog post I’d written,
2. I got to brag about that blog post,
3. I got to brag about the fact that I’m so smart, that people have tried and failed to give me surprise parties in the past,
4. I got to use the term “It sucked to be me” for the first time and, in general,
5. I got to  complain about my week.

That last point reminds me of a favorite movie quote (at 1:00 in this two-minute clip):

If you had trouble hearing that quote at the one-minute mark,,  Dr. Walter J. Kornbluth (played by Eugene Levy) said this:

What a week I’m having!

But you know what? I hope I’m not spoiling anything for anybody,  but by the end of the movie “Splash,”  Dr. Kornbluth (as well as all the other characters I cared about)  had No Worries.

And I feel safe in saying, now, that I’m back to No Worries, too.

Thanks to Eugene Levy, Tom Hanks,  everyone else who collaborated on “Splash,” other creative collaborators everywhere,  and to you, too, for reading today