Anxiety and gifted adulting and aw hell get me off this rock

My emotional over-excitabilities are at a forest fire level lately.

Kinda like a red-flag warning, EF5 tornado of red-hot flame, tearing across the prairie to Laura and Pa level of out of control.

I am supremely proud of the fact that I have not lost my shit 1) online, 2) with my sons, 3) with random people out in the big, bad world.

It’s because of the big, bad world that I am on edge.

But I lose my shit with myself daily. Hourly. Between thoughts.

The daily news cycle is a fustercluck of epic proportions. I literally jump when my phone dings with any kind of notification.

I’m so deep into focused breathing that you’d think I was in the middle of giving birth. #GodForbid #NotStartingOver #LetUsNotEvenJokeAboutIt

We talk so much about over-excitabilities with our gifted kids. But you know? Just like our kids don’t quit being gifted when they graduate, they don’t hand over the over-excitabilities in exchange for that diploma. Giftedness is wiring, it is lifelong, and it tiptoes through the generations. The OEs they have when they are four years old and losing their shit and you’re wondering if you’re going to let them live to see age five are the same OEs they will have when they are 24 and 34 and 84. And I guarandamntee that you, as a parent of a gifted child, are drenched in your own over-excitabilities. Like bathing in cheap cologne some days, I swear.

I know that I am tightly wound, that my main squeeze is emotional OE. But you know what? It also makes me a damned fine musician, and sometimes a fairly decent writer. I’m also dipped in the imaginational OE pot, which helps me interpret music and sometimes allows me to write something good-ish. Those are the silver linings to the two craptastic OEs that plague me. Because the stormy side of that cloud is that I am easily affected by the pain of the world (and dearsweetbabyjesusonaliferaft there is a lot of that these days) and can imagine myself (or my sons) living in a van down by the river in two steps or less.

Anxiety, yo. It’s a thing. So is gifted adulting. I’m really over both.

Yes, I turn the news off, and yes, I get off social media, and yes, I engage in all manners of self-care. Helps enough to keep me functional right now.

But I keep an eye to the sky, wondering when the aliens are going to arrive, because that’s all we need to complete the absolute dystopian shitfest we find ourselves in these days.

Hope they like marshmallows. We can make s’mores over the flames of my OEs before they annihilate us.

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Today’s post is part of Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page September blog hop, on philosophical and spiritual anxiety. My anxiety was so through the roof that I couldn’t expound upon it very well, so please go read the other writers’ posts.

Toast some marshmallows while you read.