neither

last time i went to therapy, we watched two short videos.

the first was about a person who threw a party and invited all their friends. the party was going well until their rude and obnoxious neighbor brian showed up. brian annoyed the guests, so the host threw him out and then went back to the party. but brian sneaked back in and the host had to kick him out again. at this point the host decided that in order to keep brian out, he should stand by the front door and watch it carefully. this kept brian out, but the host was sad that he had to miss the party.
so, the host decided to just let brian come in and try to enjoy the party anyway. he found that he still had a pretty good time as long as he was ignoring brian, and after a while he barely even noticed that he was there.

i didn't really get this metaphor. my therapist had to explain to me that brian represents bad feelings, i'm the party host, and the guests are positive life experiences. the moral of the story is supposed to be that if i worry too much about avoiding bad experiences, i won't get to enjoy the good ones either.
i didn't like that one much.

the second video was about a man who drove a bus. every day he drove the bus along the same route, which he hated. sometimes he thought about driving on a different road, but he had a bunch of rowdy passengers in the back who would yell mean things at him whenever he tried. to avoid being yelled at, the driver made a deal with one of the passengers. she agreed to keep the loud passengers quiet, but in exchange, he had to agree to keep driving the same route every day. so the bus was quiet, but the man was still sad.
one day he decided he was tired of that same route, so he took a different turn. the passengers all yelled at him, but he kept driving anyway, and after a while they got bored and sat down. they kept complaining, but the driver turned the radio on so he couldn't hear them as much. at one point the bus got stuck in some mud and the passengers got loud again and told him to go back, but the driver kept going forward anyway, and eventually he got out of the mud and the passengers quieted down again.

i liked this metaphor very much. i liked it because i do see my anxiety as a thing that exists because it serves a purpose.
watching this video clarified something for me, too. when i would talk about my girlfriend and how i wanted to break up with her but i was nervous about that, my therapist would ask why i was nervous. i would say something like, "because when i break up with her, i will feel sad/guilty/lonely." then my therapist would say, "how do you feel right now, thinking about this?" and i would say "i guess i feel sad/guilty/lonely." the point was that there was no real difference between the bad feelings i had about dating my girlfriend and the bad feelings i was anticipating having when i broke up with her except that the former was indefinite while the later wasn't. (i mean to say that wanting to break up with a person you're dating can go on forever if you never break up with that person, but most people eventually stop being sad about a breakup.) so in the end i wasn't actually avoiding any bad feelings by staying in that relationship.
and that guy, the guy driving the bus, he wasn't really avoiding anything either. the passengers complained regardless of what road he drove on but if he drove on a new road he at least had the opportunity to have some positive experiences even though the passengers were still there.

i don't know how much learning about why i feel the way i do actually helps me make better decisions. the bad thing you're experiencing is usually preferable to the other bad thing you might experience. i feel like i realize things that would be useful but i never do them because it's too hard. whenever i learn something new and then i have an opportunity to use it but i don't, i feel like i'm even more useless than before, because before i was just ignorant, but now i know better and i'm still making bad choices. my therapist says i've gotten better at things - being functional, she means. she says that it's impressive that i've managed to make it through half of college with a pretty good gpa, especially because in college people don't exert as much effort to make you do things as they did when you were in high school.
i just feel so bad for her. she works so hard to help me and when i go in there and tell her i still feel like trash i think she might as well try to nail jelly to a wall. sometimes i think i should just stop seeing her so i can fail by myself instead of making someone else feel like a failure too.