I am Tired and My Leg Hurts
Comparison is the thief of joy; for the most part this holds true, except when it doesn’t. When it comes to health, my health in particular, I can look back to the golden age of good health that I didn’t enjoy or any of the many times my health has been far worse than it is today.
Right now, things are frustrating, while resting I haven’t been feeling overly exhausted, with times of feeling like I could do something a bit more energetic than typing. Being the enthusiastic sort, I generally like to do something, and that is when life gets really frustrating. You see my health condition involves malaise, which is an important word because it adds the component of not wanting to do things alongside the inability to do things. Sure, this is depression, but it has become bearable. I insomnia and hypersomnia my days away in a mostly motionless funk. The frustration comes when I am motivated.
Take yesterday, I was motivated to write, nothing was there, not an issue, I have plenty of things to do instead of writing. I was not in a “words” sort of a mood; in fact, what I really wanted to do was to organise and tidy my physical environment. Things have got overwhelmingly out of hand, and it is affecting me. I know my physical environment impacts my mental well-being, and it is important for the autism part of me to have a certain level of organisation and structure to the chaos that the more dominant adhd part demands. It is all about managing the tension. So, I was motivated with any number of places to start and I wasn’t silly exhausted.
Less than five minutes of picking up a few bits and pieces and putting the rubbish out left me huffing like I had run for the bus. This is massively frustrating; my place is a mess and is getting dirty. Mess I can handle, getting dirty I cannot. This is not me, and not how I want to be living. This is where comparison and frustration do a number on me. If I was sicker, then I wouldn’t care; if I wasn’t sick then I could push through and get more done. I am stuck with the motivation to do things without the physical ability to do them
And it doesn’t stop there. The whole reason I was thinking I could have a bit of a potter about and make some progress on my physical environment was because I couldn’t apply my mental faculties either. I have the motivation to write, yet when I do, bosh, absolutely nothing. It doesn’t help that my last 2 blogs have been over a thousand words, because now I am thinking I have some bar to get over. There is no bar, and in fact, there is no pressure to write anything at all. This is something I enjoy, not a stick to beat myself with.
It feels like my creative and non-creative selves are locked in a battle where I can generate the impulse but not the energy to sustain it. I have a thought, a line, a concept, but when I go to develop them, there is nothing. For stories, I can think of a set piece, a place, a character and their history but I can’t think of anything to do with my characters or for things to happen in my places. My thoughts exist as stills, frozen and lifeless. That is when I think of anything at all. Lately, even allowing for my cognitive bias that tells me I don’t write or create enough, the well has been dry. I have idea capture tools, but if I go for one, the idea escapes even more quickly. I can keep a thought for the entire drive but stop to make a note or fire up the voice recorder and it fizzles out in the time it takes to get to the first word.
None of which is the end of the world, and like I like to do when journalling I don’t want to end on a negative note. I am frustrated and finding things difficult. Having ideas like buckshot doesn’t help either. However, if this were a job where I had to performatively show work then my life would be easy. I have my back catalogue to keep filling, I found another folder with apparently undocumented work today, and a project management tool could be brimmed equally easily. I don’t need to look busy, to simulate productivity, that is in itself a blessing; instead, I want to be actually productive because I have cool things I want to do and make. The frustration is not making progress on those things.
After saying that, it is still February, and I haven’t set any deadlines because I don’t need to add pressure to the process. What I need to be doing is keeping focused on what I can do rather than what I can’t, an eye on what is and not what is not. This is new ground for me. Most of my life I have defined the majority of what I am doing by what I don’t want to happen. “I don’t want to …” is where most endeavours start. Poetry was different; I wanted not to fail, but failing was not writing anything at all. Which, I guess, is where my obsession with output took root. I certainly didn’t write nothing with approaching one thousand poems in my spreadsheet.
To wind things up, I have been hurting more of late, mentally I have been battling emptiness, and generally I am frustrated by the gap between what I want to do and what I am actually capable of doing because my health is in a limbo state where it is improved enough to feel motivated, but not improved enough to do things. Akin to being in hospital where you are well enough to be bored but they can’t send you home either. Until next time, please share your frustrations or goals and, of course, keep on -keeping on.
