Day 1, 18/05/26 - Intro
"It's not going to come from anywhere else, the strength, the inspiration, the magic. It happens here and now."
I did some art therapy. It was very much like "doom and terror are written in the stars for me and I exist at the mercy of the world."
It's the lazy way out, if I blame everything on the world I don't have to take responsibility. Really take responsibility. I can keep waiting and waiting and delaying and delaying and blame my problems on lack of the correct circumstances.
But this is leaving out so much of the story. Leaving out so much of where the magic and inspiration in life is.
You feel tension because you know part of you is blocking yourself off from that magic, that inspiration, so that you can keep blaming the world and you don't have to take responsibility...
Lest you fail.
Lest you run out of it somehow.
I say the risk of failing is worth it to own all of your life.
Each day for a week, I try and be the motion in my world. I try and stop waiting for life to arrive and instead go and meet it.
Day 2, 19/05/26 - Take Responsibility for the Evidence You Use
Some notes from my phone:
“You don’t wait until it’s easier to start, you start so that it’s easier”
“I’m scared I won’t be able to maintain my spark, I’m scared I won’t be able to rely on myself.”
“I can’t wait for this to happen later, delay it.
Or have to depend on something/someone else. I have to take responsibility for the stories I tell myself, and collect evidence for new ones.“
The theme of waiting and delaying came up in therapy today. Being risk averse, not wanting to bet on yourself in case you fail. Being more familiar with coming up with excuses, blaming the world, delaying.
My therapist described becoming less risk averse as a process that takes time. It’s like conducting controlled experiments, slowly slowly you drip field yourself new stories and test how the world responds to them. We acknowledged that this was something I had already been doing.
So I did test it out on a real life situation. It definitely felt like waiting and delaying. I explained I had just had therapy and didn’t want to wait and delaying anymore, and I was willing to face the consequences of respecting my own autonomy. I got the clarity I needed.
Day 3, 20/05/2026 - Taking a Strong Drink
I struggled to get up for work today. Maybe it was because I was looking at a time horizon that was too far out, maybe I was setting the bar too high. "I'll have to make sure I have all my stuff for work, and shower, and brush my teeth, and squeeze in a coffee and if I don't get time I'm going to hate my life and blah blah blah".
That stuff is all really hard and uncomfortable. But what about literally just sitting up in bed? Starting there. That's loads easier. You don't wait until it's easier to start, you start so that it's easier.
This day I thought about courage.
I thought about the future, I thought about how much of my world is things that haven't happened yet. Potential futures (as I'm writing this out from my phone the day after, I'm considering how life circumstances set me up to mostly look into the future and anticipate bad things, maybe).
I'm also thinking about how I leave out so many stories, and so much of the stories I do hold onto. My world is not in 3D it's in 2D sometimes.
Hoping for the best and rising above the risk of being disappointed requires courage.
My therapist said it's important that I'm able to explain myself, to myself. I'm still working on that.
This week is all about not waiting, not delaying, not getting in your own way I suppose. But whichever part of me is blocking my way, whatever is motivating me to maintain this, maybe for protection, is very very very strong. I'm curious about why it's strong. Strong enough to keep me stuck and frozen. I thought about how in our regular lives, there are things we hold onto very easily, and things that evaporate like vapour. Do you remember details of a dream you had 3 weeks ago? I bet not.
Why do somethings stick and others don't? I'm not about to explain this about myself to myself.
And I thought, what do you do with a very strong and concentrated force? You distribute it out, across time (pacing and slowness), across space. I tried to do a bit of that; I wrote a list of things to do that would help.
I also thought about how, waiting for external relief, reprieve, etc is a very human thing to do. That's why we seek love, that's why people take drugs. I should be gentle with myself during this process.
Day 4, 21/05/2026 - Life is a Buffet but I am Vegan Today.
Okay, you're waiting for circumstances to look X, Y, Z. You put everything on hold, because that's the only way you'll be happy right? But imagine for a moment, that exactly the opposite happening is what's needed for you to get what you want. What does that feel like? I think this is the feeling of trying to entertain the idea that maybe failure doesn't exist, and equally success does not exist only in a very specific set of circumstances.
This is a bit of a mental game; it helps you to appreciate that we know nothing about nothing. It also helps us to not let so much of out internal state depend on our external circumstances. They're not even external circumstances, they are imaginings.
Why use things that are not real to block our own, very real journey?
Life is a buffet:
Of time scales
Of perspectives
Of Opportunities
And we don't have to let things get in the way.
All of the above sounds very nice, but it doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel like it's landed for me. We're going to apply it to some actually, prickly, stuck feelings I have.
I am nothing, and it's such a strong and permanent story. I'm faceless, impactless, empty. I feel like nothing. I see myself as nothing. I feel frozen in this feeling, it affects things I do, and I don't feel like I stand a chance against it.
The waiting part is, someone else coming along and making this feeling of being nothing, more bearable. It makes me wonder, what have other people got that I haven't got? What am I waiting for from them? If I can't answer these questions it's like I can't articulate the problem properly, I'm battling an invisible foe.
What do I do? Art therapy? Parts work? 2 minute stream of thought writing sprint? I'm going to try the sprint I'm setting the timer on my phone, or am about to. But first, what is the actual prompt?
I depend on other people so much to feel real and legitimate. It's like, rather than existing as an individual, my selfhood is actually distributed amongst people. Different people have different parts. Everyone else is holding the answers, the peak of stories about myself. A queue is being caused because I am applying oversimplified stories to very complicated human life. Everything about myself that I hold onto with sincerity is a completed story.
What are you most afraid of when you aren't able to complete these stories and use them to assign worth and meaning to yourself and your life?
I'm afraid that I'm living a life I don't recognise and isn't legible to me or real for me. I'm scared I'm living a life without meaning, without words. I feel like I don't have direction, maybe this is that stuck feeling that I'm describing this week. No one showed me or nothing showed me how to recognise myself and my life without these completed stories. It's a formless life. I'm scared of being formless, dark, without signal, without a voice. It's scary. I'm worried about being and feeling invisible. I don't know how to correct this on my own. I can't correct this on my own I'm waiting for something. Void.
I'm being challenged to confront and move past the void, maybe... and to do this work independently.
Okay now I'll do some art therapy.
so this art therapy technique requires you drawing a piece of art, and then sort of interviewing it afterwards.
This art was called Layers, Texture, Topology of Emptiness. Censorship.
the origin story of this art is that it came from bracing for, and anticipating disappointment, Void and lack. That was the only way it could continue.
And what this art's unfulfilled need is, small wins. Starting at the start.
I also wrote out come related words and phrases on the page:
It's like covering parts of the world with blankets...
It's taking a shortcut, it's sanitised. It is limited.
This is a coping mechanism and because I'm so used to it, there are gaps and censorship built into my understanding of the world.
Things are missing.
So many things covered up and almost eclipsed.
It's like I'm trying to articulate myself and there are words missing.
It's I'm myself e word sing.
I suppose a brain in survival mode is trying to work off of limited information. There isn't the time or the luxury to use a complete picture. We used a simplified picture.
Interpreting life only in completed (and simplified stories) is missing out on a lot of life.
I start with the biggest, more urgent, most vulnerable stories because it's a normal regulated brain that had lived a normal regulated life that would do otherwise.
I'm thinking about the word regulated, and how it tends towards being able to carry on regardless of outside circumstance. Specifically being organised, to carry on. I think this requires completing the small stories first, the right kind of pacing, doing things in order, considering the whole story too. It's like eating maybe, it has to happen in a certain order, and with appropriate pacing. I think it means not starting with stories that depend on other people, not waiting on stories which depend on other people. What's up with that anyway?
Day 5, 22/05/2026 - "Don't stop the music."
I didn't write much on this day, I said "maintain a rhythm and a regulation".
Day 6, 23/05/2026 - There Are Role Models Everywhere
I was thinking about a musician I appreciate a lot who is actually slightly younger than me and it's like, she didn't wait. She didn't make excuses.
I was thinking about the point I made about life being a buffet, it could be sliced and distributed and pivoted and positioned in so many ways. Something you might consider as a reason to stop everything and stop the music, someone else might look at it as negligible.
As of recent I'm developing an appetite of more real human stories. I'm noticing that online for instance people appreciate stories that they feel described their real life.
So the issue is me interrupting the rhythm of my life because, as a safety mechanism, so much of my life is articulated in a very limited way, with very limited language.
Furthermore, I've decided that if these descriptions don't play out the way I would want or expect, everything has to halt. It actually ends up with me missing out so much of what life has to offer and is a bit of a cop out to be honest.
Day 7, 24/05/2026 - Conclusion
I feel like I have to remind myself what this week was about because I dotted all over the place a little bit. So why I started writing this blog post is because it felt like I was getting in my own way or letting things get in the way, in a disproportionate way. think letting was the keyword, I feel like I was a bit too passive, especially I feel like I was a bit too angry at the world to recognise that I do have and I do have privileges, agency, power, choice. It just felt like I spent too much time waiting for something outside of me to make me feel legitimate and that time waiting is time that's going to waste essentially.
so over the week what I discovered is that these feelings are caused by a limiting of the world or stories of the world that I've done out of habit over many years as a way to keep myself safe. An oversimplification of the world. Simple stories, where it's easy to know who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what a win looks like, what a fail looks like. Feeling good was assigned to the outcome of these stories.
In a life of chaos this is a good protection mechanism. A simple version of the world is one where I feel like I can understand it in full. When we're overwhelmed, our nervous system lizard brain takes over and more of life is described in these censored stories.
It's important to make sure you aren't losing access to stories, or parts of stories during emotional overwhelm. Be sure to pay attention to clues that this is happening or could potentially happen.
But now I'm realising there are more stories to be told, and more to the stories you are already telling.
It's just a bad habit to leave stuff out, but noticing it is the first step to correcting things.
The end.
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