Feeeling Overwhelmed

Overwhelmed is a word that appears a lot in my journal. At first, I felt like I should avoid it, I was wary of falling into negativity. In the past, when I had attempted keeping a diary, purely on the prompting of mental health input, I found myself ruminating and going deeper down, doing the very opposite of what was supposed to be happening. Today, my journaling is different. I enjoy the act of writing with a fountain pen, and no doubt some of this is down to me losing the ability to write after my stroke; I feel deep joy and satisfaction at both being able to write and that my handwriting still looks like mine. It is true that you don’t know what you have got until its gone.

It is not uncommon for me to start writing with a phrase like, “I am writing this so I can be writing’, because writing in my journal is a fun thing to do. This exercise of starting with what is nonsense helps me break the spell of the blank page and my internal demand that everything I do has to be of profound meaning and consequence. My journal is for the fun of doing; ink on the page is the purpose, which is liberating in itself. Free from the necessity of relevance or utility, my journal is a mix of free thoughts, a ponder on what vexes me and encouragement. I do feel that my journal should be a net positive place, something I thought would be difficult given my previous efforts, it has so far proven to be a matter of following my thoughts where they want to go.

I am not going to laud the benefits of journaling; there is enough of that on the internet. I indulged in quite a bit of it before starting my own, I started thinking I would keep a junk journal of my travels and adventures, adding ephemera to the pages as a living document. I have permission to be messy, non-chronological and not stick to rules (invented by me or anyone else). I have times I feel like I should be using a system like bullet journaling or that I should have to-do lists and productivity measures alongside various trackers. The thing is, I am only interested in collecting ephemera, and I am currently rather woeful at using stickers and collecting things that can be stuck-in. I am weaning myself away from the productivity stuff. My value is not in my productivity, and I am not being seduced by algorithms and hustle culture again. Been there and burned out before.

That said, I do battle the feeling that I am not doing enough, that I am definitely not achieving enough, and that I am not where I should be. The word “should” does a lot of the heavy work when it comes to beating myself up and lowering my self-esteem. Should is not a word that helps me, and it contributes to my feelings of overwhelm. That is one aspect of being overwhelmed; another is actually finding the world, well, overwhelming. I am not the only one who finds the modern landscape of noise, be that the intrusion of alerts (mine and others), piped music, phones on speaker, loud people and general obnoxious noise, has reached a peak right now. Visually, things have never been more stimulating and decisively designed to divert attention.

The world delivers more sensory input than ever before. When our non-neurodivergent friends are commenting it is all a bit much, then it is safe to say that us non-neurotypical folk have been pushed way past breaking point. For me, it is not just that the world, “the outside,” has gotten louder and less manageable; it is that my world has stopped working. It feels like technology, which was reducing friction, has now brought more friction than ever. Two-factor authentication and prove you are a human are annoying, but can be filed under necessary evil, but the app for everything with a multitude of different password requirements, combined with a “move fast, break things” driven world, where the user experience is always the thing that breaks, feels like it is objectively making things harder. Also, if I walk up to you, you tell me to use a screen to order, and I walk off to use it, it would be helpful to me as the customer if you were then ready for the order you know I am about to make. Also, five confirmations for a coffee are a lot, just saying.

On that subject, no, I don’t want to round up, I don’t want to fill in a survey, give you my email, have a reward card, or anything else, even the chocolate bar for “just” a pound (it’s a Freddo FFS!). And, all this time I haven’t mentioned using a service, let alone the health service or the debacle of repeat prescriptions. Suffice to say, it is a genuine source of stress and anxiety, where recent supply chain issues do not help. I know that at this point me being dead is actually the cheapest option for the country as a whole, but that is the quiet part which is currently being said out loud.

Of course, it is not all doom and gloom, even if Sainsbury’s doesn’t have gluten-free spring rolls in (food hyperfocus anyone?). I am also slightly overwhelmed by my poetry project. It is, for the most part, enjoyable work, but I feel I have a lot to do and a lot to learn. Last week, I thought I had catalogued all my poems and put them as Word documents, so this week, I thought I would go through and write down my fragmented thoughts in a notebook so that I could go back and use them for inspiration. It is a good job that I did, I found uncatalogued poems in among the catalogued ones from 2023 and especially 2022.

This is going to be a long job because I need to check what I already have against what I find. A job made harder by older work not necessarily following my first line as a file-name convention that I introduced partway through cataloguing 2023. It is great that I am not losing these pieces, and I was genuinely shocked when I had 850 works in my catalogue at the point I first thought I had finished. That number is staggering, quite literally overwhelming, in a good way. I have so much great stuff to share. Like all good things, it will be a lot of work, but I am excited, while daunted, at what is to come.

So, overwhelmed as I currently feel, I am definitely excited. I do still have the lurgy, self-care is still very much an uphill task, but my health is not in the immediate foreground. As my old GP was fond of saying, I am doing well, all things considered. My overwhelm isn’t any one particular thing, it is when the smallest of things adds itself to what I am currently managing. And, everyone is managing a lot, things are tough on all but a very few of us, we are on the same sea trying to navigate with what are, to various degrees, boats that are developing the odd leak.

Please check out lesliepoet.com because it is a work in progress, like my new featured poem, and I am doing things in the background, like making a zine and having an online shop to distribute it, so please pop in every so often. Of course, more poems will be added, and I enjoy making videos, so there will be more of those as well as new sections, which will be announced when they go live. Until next week don’t forget to like, comment, share, subscribe, and keep on, keeping on.