following rhythms / reorientation
following my natural rhythms means i haven’t been reading as much lately, and i haven’t touched my notes in over a week. two? i’ve thrown myself almost entirely into my Big Idea, going through a shocking amount of index cards, even for me.
i usually feel guilty when this happens, when one particular fixation is replaced by another overnight. it’s just a neurotic sunk cost fallacy, but sometimes it’s also imposter syndrome, as if i couldn’t have really been interested in the first thing to begin with if i can move on from it so easily.
it’s like i treat my interests like projects – and interests have projects, but the whole thing that makes them different from every other type of project is the ability to put them down and pick them back up a week or month or year later.
fixing my roof is a project, but tending to my note index is just… the hobby, it’s the thing i enjoy doing.
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i’ve also stopped eating so much sugar, thank god. a big lesson lately has been that my “not a sweet tooth” was really “drinking every week”.
nutrition continues to elude me as a practice, but i’m making progress.
all of my “work” over the past couple of years has paid off most dramatically in how i talk to and interact with myself. instead of concerning myself with what sugar might do to the shape or composition of my body, or berating myself for giving into my cravings, i’ve been mindful that i have the power to change the decisions i’m making about food if i don’t like them, that it isn’t “good” or “bad” either way, but also the sugar is probably what’s making you break out just saying lol.
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i really dislike the binary framing of “healing”; there’s rarely equilibrium between the weathering of life and the opportunity to mend oneself from it. i prefer to think of what we do about this cycle as reorientation.
the framing of “work” is also unhelpful, though not inaccurate; it’s arduous, but it isn’t so much effort as it is release.
what we call “the work” is ultimately an unraveling of the self, an untangling of the loose threads, the unbecoming, the integration or liberation of the anti-self : it’s finding a mirror. the unwork.
in my experience, you feel like you lose your tether to time and space. your experiences can seem to become you, each blending together in a now and not-now, a here and not-here. this is what processing shock feels like, i think. letting this happen is “the work”.
and on the other side, you have to find your footing again, find the tether, reorient.
in “space”, as in meatspace, as in irl, i think this is something like embodiment; i’m still trying to figure it out.
but in time, what i mean is that you can follow the logical progression of your life, even through the chaos of your past or present circumstances.
even if the events of x, y, or z were not logical themselves, do you see the logic in how they impacted your life? this isn’t about rationalizing tragedy or abuse, but your own reactions to it. are you crazy or are you traumatized? are you incapable or has your nervous system been injured?
moreover, by reorienting yourself to your place in time, i mean having a reasonable grasp of your anticipated future – its potential challenges and opportunities, and the tools that will be available to you should you encounter them.
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following my energy has also meant not journaling as much. again, this usually makes me paranoid, as if i’m losing bits and pieces of myself that could be captured to the page. at the same time, this is what i wanted for this year: to worry less about capturing and more about creating.
there’s also just less to pick at. i snipped the threads.
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i’ve been thinking for a while that i struggle with non-productive rest; i guess it’s that project-ifying of my interests that makes everything i do feel like a task. even being online, i rarely feel like i’m exploring; there’s always an end goal, it’s always research.
maybe a different way to think about it is that burners analogy. in the “official” theory, your life is a stove and the major areas – family, friends, health, and work – are burners; to be successful, you have to cut off one burner.
and in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.
i tend to think of it in less extreme terms: this isn’t real, so the stove can have as many burners as i feel i have major life areas / responsibilities at a given time, and rather than cutting off a burner entirely, i think about turning some burners down to increase the heat of others.
this month my “learning” burner and “health” burner have both been turned down in favor of “creativity” and “family” burners.
that’s more compassionate phrasing in general for how i’ve been spending my time, but i also wonder if i can think about turning down – or cutting off – a burner as a form of rest, not deprivation or sacrifice.
maybe cutting off my learning burner doesn’t indicate a lack of interest, passion, discipline, or even a preference for something else; maybe it’s just a cooling off period.
and so i can rest in one area while turning up the heat and picking up interest – although not necessarily a project – in another. it doesn’t have to be productive versus non-productive rest; maybe it’s just resource allocation. and burnout is what happens when i run out of the theoretical infinite gas and all the burners go down at once.
not quite that simple, obviously; sometimes the gas pressure is too high or low, or someone turns the oven on without you noticing.
some days lately it feels like someone just put a hole right through my gas line. it’s a slow leak, but it’s there, and and i’m worried things might explode around me.