Extraordinary thing, the mind.  I never cease to be amazed at my own capacity for irrational emotional reactions.

A small thing occurred today.  A very small thing, which in and of itself, means nothing whatever.  It bears a passing (though very tenuous) similarity to a much larger, more significant, more painful thing that happened many years ago.  Now, I know perfectly well that it isn't the same at all, and yet there's a massive emotional reaction.  I watched it start, knowing it was starting, knowing it wasn't in any way an appropriate response, but quite unable to prevent it happening.

Now, some considerable time later, my rational mind is still watching this all going on, still fully aware that it's a completely phantom emotion, inappropriate, out of all proportion, and unrelated to real events... but equally without a clue how to switch off this constant layer of unruly angst that permeates everything.  The only thing guaranteed to kill it, is an external event, out of my control - which is a problem in itself, because the absence of that event, the waiting for it, becomes bound up in the existing emotional gordian knot.  I have, somehow, to force myself not to want that event, not to attribute huge significance to it, not to think, "everything will be fine when that happens"; because to do so would be to reinforce, amplify, legitimize the problem.

None of this is especially ground-breaking of course - I've no doubt it's very familiar to pretty much anyone who's likely to read this:  Everybody has their own little pot of neuroses, and their own ways of working round them.  It does fascinate me though, that two such conflicting ideas can co-exist in this way:  That I can be rational enough to sit here at the keyboard and make a stab at describing what the irrational, emotional part of my head is up to, yet not sufficiently in control to stop it.  Fascinating.