One of the unexpected benefits to keeping a – more or less – weekly blog is that, if you go looking, you can spot trends and patterns in life, the universe, and everything.
Looking back over the past few weeks, every Sunday post I’ve tagged with “Challenges” and “Life,” and I hadn’t noticed that until this morning.
Here’s why that’s significant: I’ve been struggling with…Something…lately. I’m not being vague, I simply can’t articulate what it is, but it’s there. It may not even be a single thing, it may be a combination of things but, whatever it is, it’s triggered a serious need for me to have more control over my environment, to the point where, earlier in the week, I walked clear down a hallway to throw a switch so that they (there are 3 in that hallway) were all pointing in the same direction.
We joked about it at the time and, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but, looking back on it, it was a hint that something wasn’t quite right.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve got a pretty good idea that it reached some kind of tipping point at the beginning of the month. I’m not going to go into details, but there had been a lot of “This-just-happened-and-now-you’ve-got-to-deal-with-it” going on. They’ve come from different areas in life, but usually it’s been more spread out.
The way I figure it, I’ve been circling the wagons, mentally, for the majority of February.
And I never mentioned it to anyone.
A big part of that is because I don’t have a solid answer to the inevitable “Why?” That alone makes it difficult to talk about. Take that and mix in a predilection for being quiet, and you’ve got an eventual problem.
I’d been dealing with it inappropriately, letting stuff slide, etc.
I realize that I’d been venting some of that back pressure here on the blog. I’ve said before that this blog was as much for me as for you, but it hasn’t been enough. I’ve been waking up, telling myself that I just had to get through the next 12 or so hours, or the next couple of days and I’ll be ok.
That’s no way to live.
So what am I doing about it?
More Self-Care. I’m taking a look at my habits: Sleep patterns, the amount of exercise I get, the amount of mental “Down Time” I have (I suspect that it’s not enough). I’m stepping back from stressful environments, and that includes reducing the amount of time I spend on Social media.
That’s going to be a bit of a juggling act, because, as a writer, I do need to engage and instill interest in me and my work.
But I’ll be checking it less often and I’m going to be using Twitter’s “Mute” feature.
A lot.
There’ll be more of the things that make me happy, that I’ve been putting aside because there wasn’t time, etc. Maybe I can skip the 15 minutes of scrolling through Facebook and go do something that matters more.
We’ll see how it goes.
In the mean time, take care of yourselves.
Time: 11:50 am – ish
Music: Blind Guardian – Wheel of Time (Live)