It was... uninspiring. I needed that kind of downtime, but I wish I had been doing something better, something more enjoyable, with all that wasted time. The only thing I think was even remotely healthy for me at the time, were some of those e-mails I sent. I was obsessively attached to my Google Reader and regularly sent my friends collections of links that they would like, or that had a coincidental theme that resonated with me that particular day/week. Of course, I gave all that blog-reading and e-mailing an overinflated sense of importance (who spends 10 hours back to back doing that kind of thing?! Eeeep), but it kept my brain moving, it kept me constantly inspired somehow.
I want to get back into collecting things from the Internet regularly and posting them or sending them to close friends. I do NOT intend to obsessively spend hours at a time doing this (I have already been online for over 2 hours bouncing from tangent to tangent, how unfulfilling!), and I FULLY intent to incorporate things from my daily life as well, as I did in the scant posts here before I realized that gratitude blogging in letter-form was not for me.
I want to get back to keeping an eye out for patterns. I want to re-open my mind to the imaginative energies of drawing connections between things. I want to collect them and look at how they make me feel, and at the ways I am already a living example of their lessons, and at the ways I can further work those lessons into my life.
I want to get to a place where I won't forget things that were once important to me so that I don't constantly run into the same lessons all the time without having learned them. I want to get to a place where I can look at something and just know if there's a deeper lesson to be had or if it's just something that was nice to see.
Without further ado, here are the things that have stayed with me this week, and that I will be working on:
1. This print of Bertrand Russell's quote: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
(I think, after seeing it earlier this week on Tuesday, it somehow got into my head that I should just give into the temptation to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and be ENTIRELY IRRESPONSIBLE... which is both good and bad. Good, because I feel so free of anxiety that I actually feel an inclination to do things because I want to enjoy them. Bad, because, well, I've been pretty irresponsible. Clearly I need to work on things in therapy, and clearly I need to learn moderation and compartmentalization. I need to learn to do what I need to do, when they need to be done, and then shift easily into or out of relaxation mode. I need to take when I need when I can get it and not expect everyone to accomodate me.)
2. Some comment I read (can't find it) on a survivor blog where someone shares their journey with their therapist into becoming a functional, productive human member of society - which entailed a lot of introspection and coming to terms with the inner resistant monologue that, unnecessarily, asks, "How can you expect me to ___, when I've been ___?" And deciding NOT to give into that.
3. Similarly, two of the comments on this post (also a survivor blog; trigger warnings for suicide, self-harm, rape, incest, abuse, involuntary hospitalization). The comments said:
15.
Eric B. | June 12, 2012 at 7:32 am
Eric B. | June 12, 2012 at 7:32 am
16.
Cinara | June 12, 2012 at 7:46 am
Cinara | June 12, 2012 at 7:46 am...which I instantly realized was the lesson behind my therapist's constant telling me that I CAN choose not to give into my situation, I CAN choose to repeat to myself "it is not life-threatening, nor am I incapacitated or hospitalized", and I CAN use that to enable functioning. Maybe it's because the thyroid problems are relateable, but I've begun saying "Shut up, Thyroid" and processing the thoughts that come up. There are surprisingly few of them than there were a few weeks ago when I called my therapist in the throes of a panic attack, and it was very freeing to say "Hey yeah, I'm doing okay, even for someone like me it's not hard or impossible to do something like walk to the train station."
4. This is me. To a TEE. This comment holding the OP responsible is exactly what I need to hear:
"Stop making excuses. Step up. You want to do good in school, start working and stop whining about it. You can change today. Start your assignment. Perhaps get a doctors note or talk to your teacher and explain the situation to him?Just to let you know: Even if you fuck up on this assignment/highschool, your life is not over. You can upgrade by going to a community college and transfer over.Again it's all on you. Good luck."
6. Ramit Sethi's Big Wins Manifesto. I think it dawned on me that all his "systems" actually just teach the same lesson as Gala's post above on minimalising choices to maximize happiness. He and his clients and his friends have their focuses that they want to spend money and time on, and they work harder at the beginning, in small bursts, to reduce the options that can take away from their priorities. They focus on reducing. Then they just focus. On having fun, on shopping, on eating out, on ... whatever they choose!
7. Neil Gaiman's graduation speech. "Make good art. Make it on the good days too." & "And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time. I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work."
That goal is the reason you are struggling, the reason you are working less than glamorous jobs, the reason you are busting your ass to make connections and move on to the next job.
