The Imaginary "You've Let Me Down"

I cleaned out the fridge the other day. I'd left it way too long. Again.

The fridge is one of the things in my life where I still put my head in the sand. Big time. There are many small things that contribute to my fridge-related chasms of despair. I am not tall enough to see the top shelves. Sometimes, I overshop. I am still not 100% on see-through containers. Things still get lost in drawers.

The more stuff goes wrong in the fridge, the wearier I get about tidying it up. Once the first thing goes bad, I feel like I've failed. Again. I feel guilty because of the food that went to waste. I also feel like I've let myself and everyone in the household down.

So, I disengage and look away. I stop looking at the fridge and shove things further into the back of the shelves. It gets really angsty eventually.

The relief when I finally clean out the fridge is ridiculous. Every time it's a colossal weight off my shoulders. Especially since it is usually not nearly as bad as I had imagined and throwing things out does not take a lot of time.

You know how sometimes you don't call a friend for weeks because you feel like you've let them down? When you finally call, they are just glad to hear from you and you suddenly realise that all the drama you built up in your head is unnecessary.

That's me and the fridge.

The patterns doesn't only apply to me and the fridge or me and other people, though. I think the same mechanism is what prevents me from getting back into the game when we have skipped my yoga, lost my journalling streak, or dropped the ball on something I wanted to do.

I always thought that it was the feeling of "now I have failed and it is not worth doing anymore" that was keeping me from just getting back into things. But that's not it.

It's that I feel guilty about dropping the habit so I am weary of re-engaging with myself. In a sense, I am afraid that I’ll be angry at myself if I admit that I have skipped a day of whatever it is I wanted to do.

Of course, all the guilt and weariness immediately go away when I clean out the fridge, go back to journaling, or do a spot of yoga. Because the reality is, I am not angry at myself anymore. It’s just that my guilty brain hasn’t caught up with the news yet.

It takes time to let go of the imaginary “you’ve let me down”.