our little italian friend is magic

My huge gordian knot of neurosis and misery has sorted itself out into a not-at-all-unreasonable to-do list.

1. Just finish the certification. Finishing doesn't mean I have to teach after that. But I owe it to myself to get on with my life. (This neatly disentangles anxiety about teaching from the work I have to do, so that I can get the work done now, while taking longer to resolve the anxiety issue).
   
   
2. In order to be able to contemplate becoming a teacher (since I still think that's what I want to do) without having disabling anxiety, I need to gain two things:
   
   
   1. The confidence that I can handle all the horrendous shit that fellow teachers and parents and administrators etc. can dish out, while retaining my sanity and some measure of calm and confidence.
      
      
   2. The confidence that I will be able to do my work—prepare lesson plans, grade papers, etc.—when it needs to be done (instead of just torturing myself by not doing it and always being messy and unprepared, which was my old m.o.)
   
   
   
3. Then there's all the emotional work, which will help me a lot with (2a), where I get all tangled up in other people's opinion of me, and also with (2b), which—I'm just recently figuring out—is all about how learning to balance the demands of work and marriage, which women in my family do not do well.
   
   Emotional work includes:
   
   

   1. Continue to develop my ability to recognize, feel, and accept my feelings.
      
      
      • Keep my demons in my own head: express feelings in words, instead of acting them out in ways that impinge messily on other people (by "other people" I mostly mean Loopy).
        
      • Let other people feel what they're feeling without trying to fix them and without making it "all about me."
      
      
      
   2. Continue to practice recognizing and taking ownership/responsibility for my opinions and my wishes.
      
      
      • Once I'm clear on that, if there is a conflict with someone else, assess whether these opinions or wishes are important enough to insist upon, or whether they can be sacrificed without harm.
        
      • Whatever I decide, try to be straightforward about communicating it, and accept the feelings that will result from someone (me or the other person) getting what they didn't want.
      
      
      
   3. Keep practicing recognizing the line between what I'm responsible for, and what other people are responsible for. Don't take on other people's stuff (this includes my students who, if I overstep my boundary and take over their problems, learn to just be helpless & wait for rescue).
      

There. That's not so bad. I can do that. It's a lot of work, but it's clear and straightforward. No more dark tangled-up confused bewildered ball of misery. Just some work to do.

I told you he was magic.