fern
Well known member
There's a lot of talk about Type A personalities on here, so I wanted to bring this up and see if there are other TMSers who can relate to a different personality style.
I'm really slow. Not of speech or necessarily of thought, but I'm absolutely a dreamer, and I don't do transitions well. I have been this way since even before I remember. I was notorious as a preschooler for dawdling and daydreaming. Transitions are very difficult for me (as in, leaving the house to go anywhere, and then leaving that place to go back home, or stopping what I'm doing to eat dinner). And it takes me longer to do things: shower, get dressed, drive places, pick an album to listen to, do the dishes, listen to someone tell their life story, tell my own life story. I often feel like my brain operates on a 26-hr day, where there's more space for dragging one's feet and hanging around.
(Interestingly, my sleep operates this way, too. Without serious discipline, I usually fall asleep an hour or two later each day, as though my brain thinks it should take a couple more hours for the earth to spin around.)
I also have always felt most at home in the woods or the high desert, where things are generally quiet, where the world feels expansive and nature moves at its own pace freely. I don't live in the woods or the desert, but deep in a small city. My world feels loud and close and smelly and fast to me much of the time.
Keeping up with the world (including my husband, who is very efficient and quick, and my kid, who is young enough to not understand waiting) often feels not only mentally and physically exhausting, but stifling. I feel a constant yearning for more space. I feel hemmed in and pushed onward much of the time.
Because I have grown up believing that I'm the one who needs to adjust, it has only just occurred to me that, to some degree, I have the freedom to create whatever life feels most authentic to me. That it's OK to live in a way that honors who I am and how my brain works. I'm currently struggling with the fact that I was raised to talk fast and loud, to engage with friendly intensity, to say yes to people, to appear comfortable in order to put others at ease, to fill silences with speech. But those behaviors feel so often different from what I want, and what's happening inside. That tension, I believe, fuels a good deal of my TMS. That, and the persistent feeling that I'm failing to live up to basic expectations (e.g. timeliness).
I'd love to hear from other folks who are slow or dreamy and struggle with feeling rushed or overstimulated even in mundane, everyday happenings and relationships. Do you make the world see and accept your slowness, or do you try to come across as comfortably engaged with a fast, loud world? Do you feel that this fuels your TMS? Do you feel as though you're failing at things or falling short of expectations? How do you manage that?
And if this post is too specific to exactly relate to, I'd at least love to hear people's opinions about how low-simmering tension contributes to TMS and on what it means to craft an authentic life that may operate outside of general expectations.
I'm really slow. Not of speech or necessarily of thought, but I'm absolutely a dreamer, and I don't do transitions well. I have been this way since even before I remember. I was notorious as a preschooler for dawdling and daydreaming. Transitions are very difficult for me (as in, leaving the house to go anywhere, and then leaving that place to go back home, or stopping what I'm doing to eat dinner). And it takes me longer to do things: shower, get dressed, drive places, pick an album to listen to, do the dishes, listen to someone tell their life story, tell my own life story. I often feel like my brain operates on a 26-hr day, where there's more space for dragging one's feet and hanging around.
(Interestingly, my sleep operates this way, too. Without serious discipline, I usually fall asleep an hour or two later each day, as though my brain thinks it should take a couple more hours for the earth to spin around.)
I also have always felt most at home in the woods or the high desert, where things are generally quiet, where the world feels expansive and nature moves at its own pace freely. I don't live in the woods or the desert, but deep in a small city. My world feels loud and close and smelly and fast to me much of the time.
Keeping up with the world (including my husband, who is very efficient and quick, and my kid, who is young enough to not understand waiting) often feels not only mentally and physically exhausting, but stifling. I feel a constant yearning for more space. I feel hemmed in and pushed onward much of the time.
Because I have grown up believing that I'm the one who needs to adjust, it has only just occurred to me that, to some degree, I have the freedom to create whatever life feels most authentic to me. That it's OK to live in a way that honors who I am and how my brain works. I'm currently struggling with the fact that I was raised to talk fast and loud, to engage with friendly intensity, to say yes to people, to appear comfortable in order to put others at ease, to fill silences with speech. But those behaviors feel so often different from what I want, and what's happening inside. That tension, I believe, fuels a good deal of my TMS. That, and the persistent feeling that I'm failing to live up to basic expectations (e.g. timeliness).
I'd love to hear from other folks who are slow or dreamy and struggle with feeling rushed or overstimulated even in mundane, everyday happenings and relationships. Do you make the world see and accept your slowness, or do you try to come across as comfortably engaged with a fast, loud world? Do you feel that this fuels your TMS? Do you feel as though you're failing at things or falling short of expectations? How do you manage that?
And if this post is too specific to exactly relate to, I'd at least love to hear people's opinions about how low-simmering tension contributes to TMS and on what it means to craft an authentic life that may operate outside of general expectations.
