I wrote in my last post how I was unexpectedly crushed by not reaching a deeply personal goal I set for myself, and then I wrote about the decision not to let the goal go, but instead change the focus.
Now I’m thinking about the “how” of it all.
I’ve been doing a SHIT TON of deep thinking and feeling this past week, trying to make sense of how I’m feeling and what to do about it.
As I mentioned, the last 18 months have been just filled with low mood and stress. I’m not going to punish myself for not being able to rise above certain obligations to others- those are not things that I have much control over, and when they happen, it’s all hands on deck.
But I let myself sink too deeply into it. In order to have the “bandwidth” to deal with everything going on with things outside my control, I had to take it away from my own emotional and mental health. And I got used to that, in a way. Once you go into auto-pilot mode for long periods of time, the whole process of breaking out of that and changing direction seems like such an enormous slog.
I know there are big ebbs and flows in everyone’s life- but I’m over it. I’m, like, stuck in this mental state where I’m sort of skimming the surface of life just to keep myself from *feeling* it too deeply because everything seems so raw and heavy and I no longer have the quick filtration capacity to process everything in a rational way, so it’s all too much. I need to be making art and engaging with the outside world more and just being alive for myself again.
So this week I have been pushing myself to think of new ways to go about things and … the hard thing is that it’s not going to be an overnight process at all- in fact, it’s probably going to take a significant amount of time just to even start. And it’s going to require me to be patient and stick with it and try and see it through despite any resistance and disappointment. And I am going to have success and failure on a moment to moment basis, despite my strong desire to just make a resolution and just BE DONE with this fucking chapter. But if this is going to be a successful transition and not just a Band-Aid, I need to be patient.
I hate being patient. But it takes how much time it takes, whether I like it or not.