Introspection: In this economy?
If I was a proper content creator, a real influencer, then this week would be the perfect opportunity to launch a new course on the benefits of keeping a journal, accompanied by a listicle of my top 5 (ten for Patreon subscribers) journaling habits and a YouTube video with the all-important directors cut for subscribers. I am definitely missing a grift here.
If anyone wants to give me money for what is available for free there is the option on Substack. To be clear, I think Patreon is a fabulous place for people to make a living doing what they love. It is a chase your passion positive platform, which is rare in this age of the mighty algorithm. Me, personally, I am not comfortable with the promises that taking peoples money would put on me.
However, back to the plot, last week I was in a bit of a “funk” and while a Lazarus like recovery would be awesome, physically I still feel decidedly rough. It’s a not particularly low level underlying ache and tiredness with a little bit of extra bite. It’s where your brain can convince itself to do something and the body can give it a sharp shove back down again. I have a second home in this territory and I know it well; it is very easy to go downhill mentally as well as physically when things get like this.
This is where journaling comes in. I have been journaling consistently for 4 days a week since January. It’s a pragmatic solution that doesn’t expect me to do something that in reality isn’t possible consistently. I don’t have to journal at all, I wanted to when I started and now four months in, it has become something I look forward to enjoying. The point of the journal is to write; it is mark making. It is a little more sophisticated than putting ink on the paper, but not really. It’s my journal, it doesn’t have to be anything, but I like writing words and sentences, and I like it to be neat and dense looking, so that is what it is. At first, I really wanted to junk journal, they look awesome. I did the YouTube deep dive and Instagram, those keepsakes looked amazing. That isn’t me, or not me consistently, not day to day. I am not saying it wont ever be, I would like to, but right now I am taking small steps and keeping my expectations modest.
The thing is, when I write, I feel I should say something. That something, it turns out is mostly an introspective dialogue. It has, of course, been a process. I don’t want to fall into the trap that I did when keeping a “diary for my mental health” which resulted in me circling around the plughole and falling into darker places than where I had started. I wanted my journal to be something that if I read it again, I would actually want to be reading. A pool of negativity, guilt, shame and self-loathing is not what I am after.
Like this blog, I want my journal to be authentic and being daily it is going to flow more than a weekly pause to meditate and reflect. As I write, things often bubble up to my consciousness. Through this I have been able to introspect, it is where I realised that the situation of the world at war was weighing heavily, and it was where my thoughts on the rape academy sat, eating away like acid at my conscience. It is also where I became aware that my daily introspection was a luxury and privilege that is becoming increasingly precious. Without my journal I am not sure those thoughts could have developed to be conscious and emotional.
Starting journaling coincided with me moving my wake-up time earlier, it is my reward, I get the time I would have been asleep to do something more positive for myself. I have thanked myself in my journal for this decision and following through on it. My journal has become where I recognise challenges and importantly where I take credit for how I have met them. I take responsibility for my successes not just my failures.
You could say it is where I can be honest and accountable to myself. No trust issues with my journal, it won’t tell anyone or use my words against me. That is one good thing about inanimate objects; they aren’t narcissists. I am still learning to open up to the page. Trusting myself means being transparent, this week it meant moving from writing code for what I wasn’t doing and saying it out loud, committing to the page a truth that I didn’t want to admit to myself.
Nothing changes unless we admit we need to change something. Typically, we apply this to big things like jobs and relationships. The reality is that it applies to every part of life, big and small. Admitting I have let myself down in a big way actually feels easier than the reality of not showing up for myself consistently in little ways. I know that success is built by doing the small things that build the big thing. I know that the process of building is what makes anything worth having happen. Without the labour where is the love?
Without the introspection this realisation would have passed me by. It doesn’t change feeling ill; it doesn’t change the challenges that I face. What does change is how I feel about those challenges, and it changes how I tackle those them. Things are different, I have something to lose, the decisions I make have an impact beyond myself. I lost my edge. Losing the edge where I could drive myself to self-destruction in pursuit of a goal, that is not a loss. Losing the edge where I had no care for consequences, a good thing too. Losing the edge to the point of timidity and fear was definitely not.
The last 9 years have been rough to put it mildly; in the turmoil my anxiety has come to rule the roost more than ever. Looking back, it was always in charge, and it was the driver of so much achievement. It wasn’t always positive, that much I can see, but what it didn’t do was make me timid. Today, among other things, I admitted to myself that I have become timid.
I don’t like that at all. Timid is not who I am, not who I want to be. There is no big manifesto or ten things I can do, instead I am acknowledging that this is where I am. No value judgement; lots of people like me are timid, and caution is indeed well advised. The big however is, this timidity has me not showing up for myself and letting myself down. I am scared of making promises; if I don’t make the promise then I can’t let myself down. This might preserve my apparent self-image but it as the cost of my actual identity. I wrapped it all up very nicely in the package of self-care and realistic expectations to become something less than adequate.
So, that’s the situation, I realised I need to show up for myself in lots of little ways and stop hiding behind calling it self-care. The work, and it is work, because I don’t know what it looks like, is to build what I need. I have to establish what is right for now, like my journaling or my poetry, and like recovery, it is a building process. Admitting I need to do it is just the first step. Here I am, writing it down again that I am going to define what good self-care is and I am going to do self-care better.
This is, like life, a process, lets see how it goes and write it in a journal.
