All these things jostling around in my head. I have a habit of writing in a stream-of-consciousness style when my mind's state is agitated. I don't know when it started, but probably when I first started journalling in my first year of college and figured out that I could log all the ruminative, jumbly thoughts down and find some modicum of peace in it.
The problem is, it can be very time-consuming, taking hours, and sometimes the written rumination can go on and on, never stopping or ceasing, because my mind doesn't necessarily find resolution for all the problems that swirl around in my head.
I'm supposed to be coding again. It's past 4 p.m. on a Sunday and I haven't started on work yet that I feel I could sorely appreciate being done by tomorrow, Monday. When it gets late on a weekend day where I was hoping to start relatively early in the day on work (like at least noon-time, maybe), I get anxious. I start hearing the clock hands tick in my brain.
You're not going to get any work done, my mental clock whispers.
It's going to be evening soon, the day will be ending soon, and you won't have gotten what you wanted to do done.
Figuratively, of course. I don't actually hear clock ticks in my mind, but I do experience feelings of anxiety as time seems to slip away towards another day of unproductivity and unfulfilled intentions. The dark evening sky brings out a visceral reaction in me. I get anxious working when it's dark because of those whispering thoughts.
In college, I used to have my sister Rachel* close the blinds when it got dark and we were working late on an essay or other school assignment. We lived in a desert-like area in college, and it would usually get dark pretty early-- like 5 or 6 p.m., unless it was the summer. We share many dysfunctional aspects, but I don't think she had this particular psychological tick.
When I get anxious, I can't seem to focus or stay disciplined very easily. What usually happens is I'll start reading some manga to salve my anxious state of mind, or read article after article off of twitter, until more and more time slips by, and I'm no better off than when I've started, only having dug myself into a rut. Then, when I'm sick enough, I might start journalling in a very similar fashion to what I'm doing now, hopefully gaining some sense of resolution of how to tackle my problems in the most immediate context.
I don't really want this journal to just be a rumination diary, like the many physical journals I have lining my bookshelves at home, or a anxiety blog like the one I kept when I went abroad to study in Italy. But I don't know how other people dredge up the time to write more journal entries, just about their day or what they've been up to. I would like to do this, but it seems like a sizable endeavor to me to write a single post, and I always have things on the backburner that I'm supposed to be doing, crowding my plate. So, how do people find the time to write posts? I wonder.
The way I write probably also takes a long time, I guess. It's not like this for everyone else.
~~~
On Friday, we went out with some friends. It's the kind of thing that seems to happen a bit spontaneously. We were painting nails the night before with Rachel's friend at school, and she mentioned there was a outing she had been invited to but felt uncertain if she wanted to go if she were alone with the other participants. Meanwhile, Rachel had been hankering to gather some friends so she would have a context to invite a new friend** to hang out with her with other people around. So, we arranged to go to the said event, even putting together a dinner to go to before-hand and inviting other mutual friends.
The dinner before-hand was all right, but not as good as other dinners I had with a similar group of people. I ordered ddeobokki with chewy noodles, which was all right at first, but got a little too sweet with all the sauce at the end. Rachel ordered gizzards but they were not as tasty as other gizzards. They were just like marinated stomach or intestinal lining, nothing too tasty. I didn't have as much to say during the dinner with the conversational topics (or lack thereof with my seat neighbors) at this dinner.
We went to a gaming bar later (the original event that Rachel's school friend Lanie was invited to). Rachel disappeared after the dinner for at least an hour to hang out with her tinder friend Hunter one-on-one before joining us, which I thought was odd (and I'm sure our friends did too) since the whole point of inviting him to this friend gathering was to hang out with him around other people. I hung around my group of friends, feeling like I wasn't sure what I was doing there and not entirely at ease in the context, watching them play different games and joining in for a short round or two where I debuted my lack of skills.
So, the situation wasn't all that hot for me. After a while one of my friends suggested playing a simple multiplayer pixel platformer where the only commands are to shoot arrows and jump, and you only have one life and maybe three arrows (but you can pick up arrows where they land). The rounds are quick, so you play as many rounds as it takes until one of the players reaches 10 kills. It was a bit fun, and I did surprisingly well doing some rounds.
In the end I ended up going upstairs with Rachel to try and learn a bit of the controls for Super Smash Bros***, but her friend Hunter joined us and it didn't seem interesting to play more than a few rounds when we weren't much of a challenge for him. The remainder of our other friends were leaving by that point, so we decided to leave as well, and struck out for a quiet bar in the area where I could get to know Hunter better, with Rachel with us, since it was my first time meeting him.
Although most of the night wasn't super enjoyable for me, there were a few highlights close to the end: 1) my co-worker Peter, who is a sheepish and super-quiet 30-year-old that deceives everyone with his youthful appearance + bashful demeanor and that everyone adores, teased me by hiding my backpack behind him when I went to look for it. He did the same thing earlier in the night (I leave my belongings around a lot!) so I went to grab it from behind him, but he transitioned it to the front. I just looked at him in consternation and I think this amused everyone present. 2) Our cool friend Luke hugged us at the end of the night when we were leaving. Win! Luke is super cool and it feels nice when he acts friendly to you, for no reason other than he's a friendly guy. Yay. 3) Playing surprisingly decently during some rounds of the pixel platformer game I mentioned before.
I got along decently with Hunter as well, who's a bit of an eccentric himself, but I'll save the details. After getting to know him a little, we went to my workplace nearby to check out the view shortly and play some ping-pong (another game Rachel and I are horrible at) before calling it a night. It was around 1:30 when we got home.
~~~
The next day though, I lied around in bed a lot just spacing out and reviewing/processing the events of the previous night. Is this what introverts do? I bet not all of them, at the very least. The room was a mess, and I knew I should clean it, but I was lazy. After I ate breakfast, I excused myself saying I should clean it, but mostly what I did when I got back was sit in bed, gazing at the closed lid of my laptop and wrapping the blankets around me. It was like I could hear the bed calling out to me, calling my name. The bed is so comfy! After a while (during which I may have also laid down and lied for a while) I got up and very slowly tidied up, with intervals of spacing out.
By the time Rachel got back from her hike that day, around 8 p.m., I was reading manga and thinking I should nap before getting to work. We ended up watching the leaked episode of Game of Thrones and I felt unsatisfied by the end of the day, although Rachel claimed it was near bed-time since it was around 11:30 p.m. I wanted either to be entertained more, or work, but working was in doubt since it was late. So I pestered Rachel for more conversation before getting to sleep.
These days, I seem pretty low on motivation, for instance, to handle all the errands I had hoped to take care of this weekend. Our vacation trip is inching up this Friday, and I have a bunch of things I need to take care of before then -- shipping a package, picking my health insurance plan, etc. And of course, there's the work I mentioned at the beginning of this withering post that needs to get done. It's pretty disheartening to feel low enough on motivation that you feel it's difficult to get anything you want to get done, outside of work, done. It's been a while since I've painted anything, or tried to do any programming work -- like I want to code my own little virtual pets site, actually, I do! A while ago, I was trying to keep to a good schedule -- run, sleep early, pick clothes the night before, actually brush my teeth, etc. But it's dissipated since.
I know I should make choices that improve my disposition and my personhood, but when it comes time to actually make those choices -- like working or doing something constructive instead of watching episodes of Insecure after work, I feel my will-power on low reserve. It's hard for me to remember that if I don't want to work, I can at least do something interesting related to programming (like configuring my vim set-up), working on a virtual pets site / look into JS animation, watch talks/lectures about programming / do some leisurely programming exercises/reading, paint, crochet, watch roller skate or hair braiding videos [...]. When I'm behind in work, I feel like I don't want to work on an oral history project with Mom, so I ignore that it's been a while since I've done anything for it and I interact with her minimally. I guess I feel bedraggled.
I think I need to accept that I'm a naturally person of more ennui than is typical for others. Acceptance is the first part, so says a lot of self-help advice and Buddhism. I also have to go back to aiming to be a more composed person, at a simple level. I probably need to look at it in the lens of habit-forming, per the advice of Mark Manson regarding discipline and willpower. If I form habits, it will be easier. I should at least brush my teeth and pick my clothes, and try not to dump old clothes everywhere on the floor so they need to be cleaned up later. And every time I make the choice to watch episodes of TV at night, I should know I'm building up a habit that makes forming other habits I want to form harder too.
~~~
I guess finally I can work now. When my mind is ruffled, I don't feel I can do anything until I get these thoughts out of my head. It's a bit compulsive. It's 6:30 now.
*Rachel is a codename. When we were little, we used to look in the mirror and muse about how certain name seemed to suit certain people, inexplicably. I'd look at her, and we'd say she looks like a Rachel or Sarah. I was an Emily or Hannah. --If I recall correctly, that is. I asked her to recall, and she said she could be a Hannah now if I wanted -- it sounds kind of a like a cool girl's name now, more than Rachel. But Rachel suits her, however unfortunately, so I'm going with that.
**She made this friend off of tinder. He was interested in either being fwbs or friends, and she was interested in either being friends or a relationship, so the only situation that seemed mutually palatable was being friends. But since they admitted they're both slightly attracted to each other, it seems safest if they hang out in platonic contexts if possible.
***We used to play Super Smash Brothers relatively often on a n64 emulator as kids (think: 7 or 8 years old), but I don't think we learned the real mechanisms for the controls well-- we just mashed buttons. And of course we weren't used to playing it on real controllers. So we never really got good at Smash, and got the eventual revelation that we actually suck at it really badly. XD
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