“tell me, princess, now when did you last let your heart decide?”
[this is just me talking about my mental health and experience of being my brain, in particular internal conflict and strategies around it]
I tend to experience the world to a large extent as a series of ideals and to-do lists that I aspire to and measure myself against and routinely fail to quite live up to. a lot of my time is spent trying to will myself to do things that I don’t want to do - or in a more enlightened fashion, trying to set up my environment to encourage me to do the things I endorse doing (but still, fundamentally, trying to get myself to do things). and even when I have free time - or am choosing to do something other than what I “should” be doing - I often end up spending my time in ways I don’t quite enjoy, feeling not quite comfortable, trying to fight with my feelings about stuff.
(yesterday I learned internal double crux for resolving internal conflict and it occurred to me that I sort of feel like I’m made of internal conflict.)
sometimes I feel like I’m trying to force myself to do things too much and need to pay more attention to my feelings and be nicer to them. other times I feel the opposite - maybe I should just do stuff and cut my feelings out of the loop (after all, my emotional well-being also benefits if I actually do stuff! (up to certain limits, anyway)).
(this seems related to the thing where when I have an internal conflict I experience it as a run-together mush in which any thought or feeling on either side of the conflict is immediately - often before it can reach its conclusion - met with a retort from the opposite side, with the effect that I don’t give reasonable airtime to either side. similarly, I give my feelings both too much and too little weight - enough to interfere with whatever I’m trying to do, but not enough to actually respect them. this is a thing that internal double crux is helpful to me for, since separating out the sides of the conflict and listening to each independently makes me more likely to actually hear and understand the entirety of each side’s point.)
anyway. I’m on medical leave from work right now because depression (layered atop ADHD and with some additional anxiety) was making it prohibitively difficult for me to get anything at all done. so I’m working on treating/otherwise improving my brainstuff and building up my capacity to do things. there are many medical bureaucracy things I need to do to set up various appointments and get on waitlists and pay my bills and go to my appointments and try meds and do labs and etc etc etc. there are also regular life things that are known to be helpful for mental health: exercise, socializing, building a routine, going outside, doing things even though depression says doing things is pointless. so: I have been finding ways to do things even though my feelings don’t wanna. and this has been helpful, I think.
but at the same time, this is a problem. because forcing myself to do stuff because I have to, don’t I, and I will feel anxious until I do and guilty if I don’t has become deeply unsustainable for me, and part of building up my capacity to work is finding new motivation mechanisms, and part of making my day-to-day experience of being my brain more tolerable is letting up on the anxiety and guilt and internal beatings will continue until morale improves.
last week I got a bunch done and had plenty of energy (…compared to my not-great baseline, but still) for the first few days, and then I kind of crashed. I downgraded my expectations of what I’d get done and I felt bad and not valid about it - there is much honor in completing my entire to-do list and much shame in not doing so! - and even after downgrading my expectations I dragged myself to things until I ran out of energy even harder and stopped.
when I was making my plans and task lists for this week, I had a strong feeling that I needed to be kinder to myself. I couldn’t just not plan to do things; things do need to get done. but I decreased the amount of work somewhat, marked more things as stretch goals, spread out the social plans and marked some of them as “ONLY if I have enough energy and truly want to go”, and decided that my highest-priority goal was that I would designate one day for doing purely what I want.
this is surprisingly rare for me. (I’d done this once before and enjoyed it a lot, several months ago.) surprising, because I’m not even working right now and have very few real commitments, and don’t spend that much time doing “productive” things, and do spend a bunch of time doing whatever? but procrastination time isn’t leisure time; and by default even when I’m choosing to do some leisure activity I sometimes end up doing what I spent the entire preceding day wanting to do and not what I want to do right now and/or just fall into some activity by default and don’t enjoy it all that much?
anyway, today was do-whatever-I-want day! I liked it. some notes:
it is surprisingly difficult to determine what I want at any given time. I spent more time and emotional energy than I would have liked trying to elicit preferences and nearly agonizing over what should I do now?? I am hoping that with more practice this will become easier.
I was unusually uninterested in multitasking. for instance, normally I by default listen to podcasts when doing things like brushing my teeth or cooking or stretching or in transit or etc.; I like this because I learn stuff and it makes activities non-boring. but today when I was doing that same kind of thing I did not want to listen to podcasts for some reason; possibly because they would have forced my thoughts/feelings into a particular pattern, and my brain wanted to do the opposite of being bossed around?
I had unusually little internal conflict around the few “productive” things I did do today
it was somewhat easier than I expected to notice when I was doing something that sucks me in but I don’t actually want to do, like reading Facebook after I’ve already exhausted the actually interesting things in my news feed, and then decide to instead find out what I do want to do and switch to that. usually I have a lot of trouble switching out of that kind of state; maybe this is because usually I need to switch to something else that I also don’t want to do?
at one point I briefly typed something quickly and then noticed that I particularly wanted to type quickly a lot, so I found a typing speed racing game and played that for a while, which was pretty satisfying
at another point I decided to make some tea and sit down and read a book, so I went and found Wicked which I’m currently in the middle of rereading, but then I noticed that actually I’m in more of a whimsical mood and want to read poetry? (this never happens.) so I looked on my bookshelf and found a French poetry book and read some
then something in the book reminded me of a Russian song I really like so I got my guitar and learned it and sang and recorded it, and that song reminded me of another one so I also played and sang and recorded that one
also I had a good conversation with my roommate about internal conflict and such
I also did some fairly normal-for-me leisure time stuff like doing crosswords and reading the Internet and watching TV
I had wondered if I would actually end up wanting to do some “productive” things (beyond the basics that I do every day), but in fact I did not
all in all this was a good experience and pretty useful for somewhat quieting down the internal conflict for a time and queering the work/procrastination binary and noticing that there are things I enjoy and doing some interesting stuff I don’t usually do. I think I’m going to try to designate a day like this at least once a week while I’m off work, and then probably at least once a month once I’m back to working.
meanwhile, tomorrow I’ll try somewhat the opposite of this: I’ll make a schedule of productive things and then do my best to stick to it. (if find that something is really not going to happen on schedule, I’ll switch things around, but try my best not to procrastinate.) I’ll still try and lean into the follow-your-heart spirit for other things, though, like what to do during breaktimes and how exactly to structure my productivity and etc.
maybe I can let both sides of the internal conflict feel adequately heard.
