5–in-5 Day 3

Fifi Xie
Fifi Xie
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

09.03.18 Brooklyn, NY
Duration 11:00–16:00

As I was sitting home and canceling plans to sleep in and chill for my last day off during Labor day, I started to “day dream”. To be honest, day dream is too nice of a term of exactly what I was doing. Ever since I was little, I would do this thing where I sit there and just think about what could go wrong and induce anxiety for myself. I didn’t realized that was a problem until one day I was thinking:

“Oh I should unplug everything in the house since I’ll be in school for at least 12 hours, and if anything happens, I need to do this and that … I’ll have to call so and so.. Ah I need to call my Great Aunt so she can refer me someone. Wait! I didn’t write her a Thank you card last New Year she must hate me. Omg no….. she’ll hate my whole family…..What if she never answers my call and I’m in an emergency… OMG I have NO ONE. FUCK I’M LATE FOR SCHOOL!!!!

You get the just of it… I freak myself out just thinking about things and events that most likely won’t happen and never bother to confirm the probability of it.


So for today I tried to document how many times I started “day dreaming” about impossible scenarios that I put myself into. I stopped documenting around 4 since I started to get paranoid of me not finishing this on time… (I didn’t count that one..)

There was total of 9 times… still a single digit so I guess we are okay??


So now is the time to make my self-induced anxiety useful…

Here is the rule:

  1. Document how many times you put yourself under stress by imagining me being in any stressful situation (x).
  2. Double that number (y).
  3. Produce a list of kind words, use the number above as how many words you need to have (y).
  4. Make a random words generator based on the list you created.
  5. Based on how many times you put yourself under stress (x), take the first (x) amount of words showed up in your generator (The words can’t be repetitive).
  6. Text (x) amount people, use one word per person in your text from the words you took from the generator, and document their response.

(*In your text, you have to address the person with the word you get from the generator. However, you text can contain other content.)


Process:

Here are the details of the word generator :

Code
Screen Capture
Video of the Word Generator

Results:

Here are some awkward texts between me and my friends:

She thinks that somethings might be wrong
My best friends parents, genuinely happy and surprised
With some friends… you just can’t be serious??
Friend I don’t really tell them how much I appreciate them
Friend who I feel slightly uncomfortable express my feelings out of the blue… immediately changed topic..
Friend who thinks I’m drunk because my text
Friend who I catch up once a while but we are close
Friend who I don’t see much but I care very much for
Friend who I know I need to verbally supports them more, it feels very natural to text them and express my feelings negative or positive

This didn’t just end there, after I texted those people I feel really content and happy to see their response and went on to reach out to more people I care but fail to reach out to.


Texting people turns out to be a lot of harder than I thought it would be.

For some people it felt natural to just say it, to some people I have to have a “decoy” message to mask off my real intention: just telling them how great they are. It’s also interesting to see how people respond.. two out of nine people thought either there is something going one or I was drunk. Yet they still appreciated my texts.

In addition to some people I also told them that I am doing a project to force myself reach out to them. My text style changed based on each person and my relationships with them. For me is to make it more “natural” and “less awkward”.

However, it is interesting to see why I have those concerns, since I am only trying to send positive texts and there shouldn’t be any concerns about being awkward. Yet I still feel somewhat uncomfortable to just text people “You are stunning”, and have to change my text style and content towards every single person I texted.

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