Check it out -- a Stephanie x-post of Emmett love!

OK. I just did something that was scary for me because I don't like being that kind of vulnerable and called my pastor while I was crying my eyes out and basically said, "Life stuff, not dealing well, hate calling anyone like this, hate that I've put myself in a position where I'm calling my pastor and not my best friend from back in Philly or the best friends in Seattle that I've somehow never made, can you help?" And he was really good about it. I just needed someone with a voice, someone outside the situation.

Anyway, what I decided after some advice from him was that as of noon board time, I'm going to step away for a few days, not because I'm angry at anyone or because I'm stomping off in a huff to leave forever, but because I need to do so both to kinda take a breath and evaluate things and because I don't want to continue to be a disruptive force on the board. He also advised that maybe I need to work through my comfort zone issues with being vulnerable and taking the first move in escalating a friendship from "polite social chat after church or writers group meeting," to something a little deeper by calling one or two of the people I can see myself becoming better friends with and meeting for lunch to talk over more serious life stuff.

So. I'll be in the thread till around noon, then I'm going away for awhile. My profile addy will still be good, and I'll continue to read LJ. I intend to come back, maybe in a few days, maybe once I've got the manuscript in the mail. But I feel like this is something I need to do for now.

Susan, good for you for taking that step and calling him.

(Um, that last of mine was massively xposted, of course.)

Emmet looks fabulous! Will the cuteness never cease?

Her next "return date" is November 8th. Maybe if she makes it back, I can boogie out for lunch.

That'd be great. My treat. Any old fancy place you like at the Ferry Building. We can sit down and work out our all-time A's all-star team, or whatever catches our fancy.

(And Dylan has a lot of meetings today, FWIW, so it may be some time before he's actually physically able to be here, see the response to his pre-apology, and say anything else. Not apologizing for him, not speaking for him, just stating the circumstance.)

Susan, I hope your pastor's advice turns out to be helpful. Good luck with the life stressors.

Susan, your pastor's advice seems sensible -- though scary to try to deepen acquaintances into friends. And -- it's AWESOME that you fought past your scaredness and called him.

Also, I think Plei's suggestion of talking to your NP again is a good one. I'm not a rush-to-medication person, but I know that when my life has been a shitstorm of stress, my doctor prescribed a very small amount of Ativan, for a very short length of time. And it really helped me to be able to dial down my stress response, which is, I think, a lot like yours -- I worry and fret and then I can't get out of my own head and so I'm stuck in my head with the worrying and fretting and it all escalates rapidly. The Ativan helped put a damper on the worrying and fretting in the first place, so it wasn't able to escalate.

(It certainly did NOT leave me complacent and unmotivated; it actually helped me to get stuff done, because I wasn't freaking out at the stress surrounding what I needed to get done.)

I think it's worth thinking about.

I hope that works well for you, Susan; it sounds very sensible.