Growing Pains

I am growing stronger. As documented in I Like Being This Person, I have been slowly healing. Although I am currently looking back at a week of tracked project work with the fewest hours since I started, I know and am capable of remembering that having continued to track my time and make my minimum quotas of time, humble though they are, is still an ongoing success, and a strength.

For two days, yesterday and most of the day before, I was down in a slump and lazy, after a sobbing breakdown Tuesday morning. And here I am awake, thinking about priorities, flitting from one thing to another, getting little things done here and then there, rather than getting trapped like a fly on the deadly adhesive thought of how very much there is to do.

It is strange, growing healthier. It feels strange, from the inside. Occasionally dramatic, but pretty much only in reflection or in my emotional extremes, blazing fury or torrential brightness which I worry will all spend itself out and leave me exhausted... and sometimes it does.

It feels strange that largely my improvement seems to be that I have gotten better at sleeping. It almost feels like magic sometimes how noticing my heaviness and excusing myself from my social contexts and going and laying down, no matter how much it feels like I "shouldn't be tired already", leads to my actually being able to sleep within just a few minutes. I don't exactly wake up feeling highly energized very often. I often wish I had someone to help pull me out of bed because lifting my body on my own feels exhausting in a sort of grim, repetitive persistence sort of way. But much of the tired that had been on my shoulders has gone once I can get moving and doing something, if I do something at all rather than just re-watching old YouTube videos.

Most times, I take my laptop with me, because it would bother me and keep me awake being tempted to go and get it so that if I can't sleep, I have it there to do things with. And I close it up and put it next to my bed, and sleep, comfortable enough in the knowledge that if I were to wake restless it would be there for me.

When I am well-rested, and sleeping more or less consistently during the nights and for long enough periods of time, wakefulness becomes different. It is more than once or twice a month that I feel distinctly capable of getting things done. I cook for myself, and while I am cooking, my mind wanders, and it seizes on ideas and desires and strings them together and insists I must write them down, tell my friends, do something to capture the resulting inspiration before it evaporates.

Sometimes it feels like I can't catch my breath and actually follow through on the ongoing project I've committed to, just because I'm so busy catching and coping with other inspirations and ideas for things I want to get done which are oozing out of my ears and eyes and mouth, burbling over and getting all over my face and in my heart so I can't focus.

It is as though my brain has formed a long, long queue of all the many things I have dreamed about while slogging through my days, half-awake; and so on the rare occasions I wake up, my whole workspace becomes covered in petitions to make them real.

I have learned important strategies from Finish It! for coping. I have been putting those things in writing but then putting them aside. I have learned important strategies for keeping going even when I don't feel like it at all. I have put consequences behind my quotas, and it has been working.

My life may be a heavy and clunking machine, sometimes clumsy and very base, but I have been getting some of its motors to stop coughing and dying so much and run sort of smoothly for a few hours at a time. Well, who'd have thought? It's exhausting work, but it can be done. And there's a bunch of neat stuff among the flies and dust being coughed out of this machine now that it's running well enough to actually disgorge some of the ideas which have been stuck in the pipes almost-formed for months.