the morbs iv: supposed former tumblr sadgirl
in which I am a girlhusband to my manwife, and the morbs matures to its name
We remember the morbs is an old term for depression, right? Well, it was fitting this week.
I could implicate specifics: conflict with close friends, money troubles, and travel played into it, I’m sure. I used to be good at travelling, but I must have let its requisite competencies atrophy in those years we were locked in, and I haven’t gotten back into the swing of it yet. Lately, I’ve been finding it very stressful. I don’t think that’s why I was upset, though. I found myself thinking about how my partner describes his anxiety.
I, of course, experience anxiety, as I’m a person with feelings. My anxiety is always about things. His is not.
My husband and I started dating eleven years ago, when I was nineteen, and over the course of our relationship he has had to lead me towards this anxiety as no logical antecedent very slowly, like it is a trough of water and I am a very stupid horse. There’s a complaint I hear from women, about men all the time: that men tend to treat feelings like a problem that needs to be solved, and not like a distressing event that’s happening and requires space and compassion. If this is a masculine trait, then this is a way I’m like a man.
I tend to suffer from the cognitive distortion of assuming my feelings are not feelings, but the rational emergence of completely sound scientific information about the world. When I have a feeling, I assume it must be about something, and that in order to make it stop, I simply have to follow through on whatever activity or requirement is causing me distress. And most feelings are a little distressing, to me. Honestly, even the good ones.