Lyrics: “I Am Disappeared” ~ Frank Turner, 2011
7:30 AM My mood and state of mind has not really improved since Tuesday. I don’t know if the “just ride it out” attitude is helping. Yesterday was kind of okayish. Not as focused and “productive” (I hate that term, but in lack of a better one) at work as I had hoped. Better than the day before though, so let’s count it as a small win.
I went to bed early-ish last night and slept alright, but still woke up experiencing… dread? Overwhelm? It’s hard to put into words, which makes it so hard to explain to others how I’m feeling. Everything feels just a little bit too much. To do. To decide. Not insurmountably so. Just a bit. Feeling really sluggish, physically and mentally. I still *do* things. I did them yesterday. But it all feels like ‘not enough’. And that starts the whole guilt spiral of not being good enough. Not working hard enough. Not being organized enough. Of not being enough. Period.
I wrote such a self-affirming “I am ok, I’m enough” post just a few days ago and that now feels like I jinxed it. See? It’s all my fault. I did this to myself. I’m kidding. Sort of. I know I did not do this to myself. I wish I’d know how to snap out of it though. I’m thinking that maybe I should have rather journaled this and not type it here in a stream of consciousness way.
So what did I do so far this morning? Maybe chronicling it will help me see how much I actually accomplish in a day. Even if it’s just little things. I felt a bit too tired to get up and start the day right away. Decided to get my phone from the kitchen and scroll through it a bit while still in bed. Not the healthiest decision, I know. But I let myself off the hook with knowing that that’s the exception. I took part in the “movie survey” I’ve signed up for years ago. Even though I don’t go to the movies as much as I used to. Partly I blame that on the pandemic and crowds and such. But I think I lost interest before that already. I don’t really know why. I thought a few of the movies from the survey looked interesting from the posters / stills and after I finished the survey I watched the trailers. Woah, all three of them looked like rather depressing stories. So not the right thing for me at the moment. In case you’re interested:
- Women Talking – Claire Foy was the reason I got interested, but this seems dreary and sad
- Till – I assumed from the poster that it was about the lynch murder of teenager Emmett Till in 1955. He and the whole community deserves that this story is told to all of us, to quote his mum from the trailer “it better be the business of us all”, so I might try watch it. It will be hard to stomach for sure, but I would be just watching, not living through it like so many PoC in the US still do day to day.
- The Banshees of Inisherin – Colin Farell in a clearly Irish movie. Yay, I thought. But this seems pretty weird. And dark as well. I might need to read a bit more about it.
But who am I kidding, I’ll probably won’t watch either movie in the theatre. They’ve cut down showing the un-dubbed original English version a lot over here and I usually prefer to watch those in English. We’ll see…
I took down the laundry from the rack and mostly put them away. I made my first batch of coffee. I finally took the few minutes (and that’s literally all it took, but I procrastinated it for so long *sigh*) to redo my “positive affirmations” post-its. It sounds silly, but it was a therapy thing a while ago and it did help, so I thought it can’t hurt to re-do them. Write a few simple affirmations like “You are enough” on post-its and post them all around the apartment so I see them all the time. In the past few months I took some of them down (and not put them all up) when I knew I had people coming over, because it feels a bit weird and I didn’t want to explain too much. But they are now up again. For a while anyway.
I sat down to start typing this as part of the “23 minutes” R or W #PeakStreak from My Peak Challenge 2023. Two more minutes to go. Ok, what’s up next? Meditate. Possibly only a short session, because my attention span is very short these days.
[I edited and added a bit of the above in the evening]
8:45 PM: Over 12 hours later. A long day, but not as filled with dread and anxiety and self-guilt as I had feared. It was okay-ish in the end. I’m too tired and sluggish (again) now to recap it in more detail. So I’ll jot down some prompts to possibly elaborate on this weekend, though I’m not making any promises.
- Problems of executing functioning: That’s something that’s been bothering me on and off in all my life, but a bit more so in the past few years, I think. I sometimes – like this morning at my laptop at home – can’t make up my mind how to plan a task, how to start it, how to execute it. I haven’t quite figured out yet what my mental obstacles are to just do it. Once I was assigned a task / had to take part in a meeting, I was doing fine. The decision was out of my hands. Weird, sometimes.
- Knowledge Base: In our team of 10 people I’m the 2nd senior one by now. People ask me about all sorts of things. I’m constantly sharing and explaining stuff to new-ish co-workers. I still haven’t gotten quite used to it.
- Guilt: of the unnecessary kind caused by low self-esteem and such. At least I caught myself in the wrong line of thinking quickly. It’s not my fault when the consultants I hired don’t work diligently. Should I have caught the (small-ish) mishap earlier? Maybe. That’s the one thing I can blame myself for. But it’s not my job to doublecheck every step of their work, is it? They get paid to do it themselves before they deliver their results. As you can see… being solely in charge of big projects is also kind of new to me. Lots of self-doubt don’t help either.
Ok, I’m not sure if this all really needs to be elaborated on. I ran some quick errands after work; one was to pick up a new mousepad after many years of just using a generic one. Getting this done was a project from my time off. Also maybe took me much longer than a “normal” person, which is so annoying, because once I actually started to process, I was done with it quickly. Here is the image I used for it 🙂
