The Seminar

So I went to the seminar. I negotiated the tube system better than I thought I would. I was quite impressed that I didn’t get lost.

The actual seminar itself may have been quite good, unfortunately I had completely tuned out and could not concentrate on a single word that was said. I was in a constant state of anxiety, and so my mind was firmly in survival mode, i.e. trying to just stay composed while counting the minutes until the ordeal was over. I did not care about the seminar, I just wanted it to be over. For three hours my body was tense and my mind was racing.

Then, of course, it did end. I sweated through an uncomfortable tube journey home, breathing in the stale underground air. Then I caught a train with a girl from the seminar who also works in my office, and we bitched about how rubbish it all was. I was surprised I still had it in me to make conversation, but I did. Somehow.

Once home I collapsed in my room, coming down from the stress. Which meant a thumping headache and a weakness in my body. For many days I had been worrying about the seminar. My heart had been beating at double it’s usual pace, and I had that icy panicky feeling in me the whole while. So now I’m pretty tired and feel quite drained. The headache remains.

To a normal person, a seminar, in which minimal actual participation is involved, would not cause this kind of stress. For me, whatever chemicals make me stressed, seem to go into overdrive at the slightest thing. So the stress caused by the seminar is on a par with the stress another person would feel when they’re about to be executed, for example. My head is really fucked up. I can’t even pinpoint exactly what I was so worried about.