In my bathroom is a little plant that needed to be repotted and watered weeks ago. I’ve stared at it every morning and night when I brushed my teeth. I’ve watched it go from green to yellowish and then it entered a black-leaves phase. I should’ve just given it a glug of fresh water and repotted it with fresh soil. It would’ve been a ten-minute job. But I didn’t. In fact, the only thing I did do was shove it into the corner of the bathroom further to avoid looking at it every day.
As a tidy, diligent person, this was out of character for me .There’s a growing irritability clawing at me on the inside, which is making it somewhat difficult to do things I enjoy, including producing interesting ideas for this newsletter. This piece will be more of a stream of consciousness - a small attempt to keep doing something that I’m committed to, when in reality I just want to lie under the covers until it’s warm outside again.
I was chatting with a colleague from work about sleep cycles and I described how I’ll have weeks where I can’t sleep at all; I’ll wake up several times in the night, toss and turn, and check my watch every ten minutes, my brain continuously operating like a hamster on a wheel. She said she has the same, especially when she’s stressed and that she would jot notes down on her phone to put her mind at ease.
Afterwards, I kept thinking about my stress points and I deduced the following: I don’t get up past 8:30 - I have this internal alarm that prevents me from sleeping in. There is a fear that I’m wasting my day by lying horizontal (why sleep when you can do all the chores that need to get done?) - there’s probably more psychology to it but we’ll leave it as is. I then thought that perhaps the demand to be up at a certain time subconsciously puts pressure on my mind to get to sleep - the more I count down the time till sunrise, the more my mind resists rest. It’s formed this sort of cyclical hell.
In that sense, I don’t have true control over my mind, which is frustrating because I'm usually rather level-headed and logical. I’ve become sick of myself. I want to believe that maybe if I stopped trying so hard, life might unfold as it should, or I would end up doing the right thing without having to think about it so much.
If I ceded all my faculties to some higher power - to the universe or to God or religion or some cult - maybe life would become easier. This higher power would operate my thoughts and actions, giving me some sort of respite, relieving me of the burden of responsibility. I could finally end up doing the right thing without having to think about it so much. This doesn't offer me any solace. The fear of ceding control unnerves me.
This feeling manifests into a short-stacked pile of - what feels like - micro-failures. I’ve allowed the clean laundry load to grow on the bed, shifting it from the bed to the floor and back each evening. Dry-cleaning that was meant to be collected two weeks ago sits in its cleaned bag in the shop. An oily stain on the stove that needs to be scrubbed away has been left to coagulate. This sort of disruption in daily life, while small and likely insignificant, means something bigger: I’m drifting through each day with a self-defeating inner monologue that favours a form of neglect and blandness above all else. My self-awareness of it makes it worse.
Last weekend, finally, I brought the plant partially back to life. Maybe it was the warmer weather or the blue sky or the sun that made me do it. It took exactly as long as I said it would. I’m hoping this means I’m out of this rut - as if by doing the thing I’ve put off, I’ve fixed the issue going on with me.
I’ve made strides this week to take care of myself - writing to-do lists of even the smallest and most menial tasks to get me into a rhythm of moving again. I’m watering and repotting the plant, so to speak. I’m not sure how much it’s helping. As someone who needs to have a solution and plan for every problem, floating in this sea of uncertainty is unsettling. I’m trying not to put so much pressure on myself though. I know myself well enough that when I’m going through something the best thing to do is ride it out like a wave. It still surprises me how much mental energy it requires not to panic when I feel at my lowest. To resist allowing myself to wallow.
Pretty much a description of my weekend :)