Friday, 23 December 2005
@ 11.04 am
The Guilts
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who gets these, even if Tim does think I'm weird for having them. The Guilts are what I'd term my psychological hangover. They are what happens at around 7 in the morning (almost always on the dot, strangely enough) after a night of drinking. I lie in bed (/couch/floor/wherever it is I ended up) while my mind goes through every single social interaction that happened the night before with a fine tooth comb - putting together a litany of imagined insults, poorly judged comments, misconstrued glances, or just plain highly embarrassing situations that I managed to say, do or get myself into during the course of the evening. I lie there wondering how I'll ever talk to person A again, or how a return to person B's house would ever be possible. Or perhaps how I'll engineer events so that from this point on I'll never run into person C's cousin again. Just, you know, for example. It's great fun. Really, you should try it some time if you don't already indulge - nothing like a little self-fear and loathing to start the day.
They would probably be better named The Anxieties, I guess, cos I end up gripped with an intense feeling of self-doubt and lie there in a hugely anxious state for about an hour while my brain feverishly works through all the possible connotations and permutations of the things what I said, did, or possibly even thought at the time. Outcomes of things that in all honesty I probably never did, or even if I did do, that other people probably would not have even noticed anyway.
It doesn't actually take a lot of alcohol the night before to bring these on, which is a bugger. Of course, the more I've drunk, the hazier the memories, and the longer it takes me to reconstruct in my mind events, and the more anxious I become...
Interestingly, while my brain is busy putting me through hell, actual me (whatever the right word is - Id? Ego? Trucker Steve?) is sitting on the inside going "Hey brain, it's cool, calm down for crissake and let me get some sleep". This never works, so more often than not I end up getting up at some stupidly early hour of the day in order to force my mind to think of other things, like breakfast and the related physical aspects of said hangover.
So why the rather gloomy blog this close to Christmas? Well, the party at Luke's last night was a good one, but now it's the morning... you see?
But anyway, now that that's out of my system I'll get on to what I originally meant to write about today - Merry Christmas to one and all, whatever far-flung places you may find yourself in as this year draws to a close.
