In a previous post, I outlined a list of some “symptoms” that I started to be able to identify, out of the fog of anxiety and confusion that’s plagued me for most of my life.
Spinning In Circles
One other symptom that I began to notice (these symptoms didn’t just start recently, but I just started to isolate them in 2019/2020) was the constant “spinning in circles”. There is a near constant conflicting set of priorities that bottlenecks in my brain about what to do in any given moment. I’m not sure if it is a contributing cause, or a result of, my tendency to procrastinate. But the result is that I am such a tangled jumble of “gotta do’s” that I often end up doing nothing.
For example, I’ll decide to do a task from my to-do list, then realize I was also going to, say, grab a cup of coffee, or do some other little thing first, and I end up, sometimes literally, pacing back and forth, unable to start anything, because I needed to take care of a few “little things” first.
It’s not hard to see how that would interfere with life and work.
My head is simply full of stillborn/unrealized plans and ambitions. They’ve been piling up for years, and I have felt paralyzed when it comes to executing the simplest of tasks.
And my action never comes close to matching my inner to-do list. It never even seems to come close to matching what most people would call a normal day of productivity. For me, achieving the equivalent of a normal day for most people is an absolutely outstanding achievement.
During most days, there’s a total lack of focus, and a lack of integration between some thoughts and others, and between thoughts and actions. In other words, a total lack of integrity. My ideas aren’t integrated with each other, and therefore my actions don’t flow from my thoughts. When I try to clarify my ideas, I often feel like I’m just in a fog, despite the fact that I’m capable of high-level conceptual theoretical thinking.
To add to the burden, this lack of integrity is then a constant source of deep shame, and the overwhelm of everything I could and should do is paralyzing. Pair that with an inability to focus when I do try to do the simplest tasks, and I end up a failure at life. There was just such a mental jumble, that I began to think of my mind as a sort of mental hoarder house. Just so full of random crap, that I could hardly turn around, much less organize it all into something coherent.
I was drowning in mental crap.
Making Just a Little Room for Myself
Turning things around was agonizingly slow, and only happened after years of trying different approaches.
Finally, there were small steps I began to take that started to make a difference. The first step was accidental. That silly little paint by numbers kit came first, and the benefits were completely unexpected. I started working on it, one little section at a time. It was extremely intricate, so I was slowly filling tiny spaces, with a tiny paintbrush, and something about it felt great.
As I worked on it, I felt calmed and more cheerful. It was the fact that I was creating a little mental space for myself. Just a tiny bit of room in my days that involved nothing but doing this simple task. I’d turn on an audiobook, and just paint. I was a little break from the constant bombardment of plans and ideas and ruminations and “shoulds”.
What’s really striking about this, looking back at it now, is: how long had it been since I’d given myself any head space of that kind? Had I ever done that? Maybe as a child, when much of life was imagination and play. But as an adult? I don’t think it ever really occurred to me.
Trips and vacations and evenings and weekends are always supposed to be about that type of relaxation, but they never were . I could never really stop my inner world of anxiously ruminating voices, and ideas that just never stop, and every time I think of an idea, it instantly becomes a “should”. And then when I think of one of those “shoulds”—or 10—it becomes a source of procrastination, and therefore guilt, and on and on the nightmare funhouse circus goes.
So this silly little paint by numbers was the first little crack that let some light in. Just a few moments of surfacing for a little air.