These days I’m trying to fight the tendency to project my feelings out onto aspects of what I call “the world outside”.

It’s that thing where you’re feeling unhappy, so you interpret the behaviour of other people as crap or evil, and you read the events in your life and the world at large in a negative way.

It’s interesting because the World does seem different on different days. For instance, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Probably only about 1/3 as busy as most people are all the time, granted, but enough to mean that I’m crapping my pants at the thought of not having time to do any given thing, and every task in my in-tray seems to be of infinite size. Meanwhile, I’m avoiding entering into conversations with anyone because “I desperately need to get some of this work done.” In fact, behaving in a way which might be interpreted as crap and evil.

I don’t think I’m talking about psychological projection in the Freudian sense, I’ve got a feeling that there’s a more general interpretation that applies more widely.

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