In an attempt to fill my time with things that will keep me from slipping back into severe depression, I’ve started doing New Things. One is volunteering and the other is taking a neighbor/friend up on her offer to teach me how to ride horses.

I really want to quit and crawl back into my hermit cave. I am way outside of my comfort zone, which, for me, always leads to near-constant worrying and ruminating. I can’t help but laugh because when my new therapist asked if anxiety was also a problem for me in addition to depression, I said “hmm, no, not really.” She later disagreed, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that yes, yes it definitely is. Now that my depression is easing, I think that anxiety is coming to the surface. (Additionally, when I tell people about this anxiety realization, they look at me like “you…didn’t know that?” So, that’s cool. Everyone knows about this but me.)

When I’m really depressed, I’m so numb and slowed down that I don’t even worry about saying “yes” to new things; the answer is automatically “no”. But when the depression lifts, my natural tendency to overthink everything and fall face-first into crippling indecision has room to become obvious. Because I feel capable of doing more than I did while depressed, I feel like I should say “yes” to new opportunities, even if I’m on the fence.

Rather than deciding to just get out there and demolish the boundaries of my comfort zone, I get…stuck. Really stuck. I want to do new things in general, but when an opportunity comes along, my worry and fear keep me from making a confident decision. It’s tough for me to decipher whether I don’t want to do something because I’m feeling overwhelming New Thing-anxiety or because I won’t like it. And, since I know that this is a problem for me, if I think there’s a chance I might like it eventually, I tend to make myself push through and do it no matter what. Of course, I do that while also continuing to worry about whether or not that’s the right thing to do.

An additional layer of this terrible cake is that I do not like quitting, even if I really want to bail. And even if this hypothetical New Thing has very natural exits where I can decide it’s not for me and stop, it still feeeeels like quitting. This makes me even more indecisive because not only do I need to know if my anxiety is coming from a dislike of the Thing or not, but I also need to know if I can be committed to the entire Thing. No quitting. Approaching opportunities like this is not fun, and I do not recommend it. 0/10.

I imagine the goal is to take each new opportunity and be able to decide, quickly and simply, whether I want to do it or not. I just don’t know how to do that without taking all of the stuff above into account and getting hopelessly tangled up. I guess step one is to remind myself that I can say “no”, changing my mind is ok, and that in many cases, it’s not that big of a deal.

Much easier said than done.