Are we sick of me writing about the season that it is, yet? Sorry ‘bout it, I have no other thoughts rattling around inside my tiny little monkey brain except “cold, sad, cold, sad, tired.” I had coffee today (Colectivo peppermint fluff latte with oat milk) and now I am both capable of anything and nothing, and I have a slight headache. My Spotify wrapped came out on Wednesday (I’m unique in that way) and I got the pleasure of seeing all of the trauma of my last year plotted as colorful data points. I mostly just listen to whatever music Spotify tells me to because the algorithm knows me better than I do. Were all of my top 5 songs by the same person, from the same album that came out at the end of July (famously more than halfway through the year)? Yes, absolutely. Am I ashamed of that? Yes, absolutely. Does said artist know how to capture every terrible thought I’ve had and present it to me on a pretty little musical platter? Yes, absolutely. Am I done with this paragraph yet? Yes, absolutely (you’re welcome).
I’m realizing my complete lack of ability to do anything until the absolute last second, including this newsletter, which is, of course, not ideal. I’m trying to write this on Thursday because I know I have a lot of things going on on Friday and want to not stress myself out more than I need to! So I am of course struggling to think of a single thought worth writing about. I have to poop. Are you having fun yet?
I’ve now been alive for 1313 weeks (yes I counted) and I still never fail to underestimate the length of a week. Every Monday, I think I have seven years until Friday, and every Friday, I’m amazed at how quickly I got there and how little I have accomplished since the last Friday.
After last week, in which I did not work and did not achieve anything in my personal life or do really anything at all, I have been trying to force myself to get things done. I’ve decided to stop waiting for other people and take charge of my own life. So far, the only place I’ve been able to incorporate that new attitude is when deciding to step out into the crosswalk whether or not there is a large vehicle careening towards me.
Due to my current lack of both sun exposure and full-time employment (despite it being something I have dreamed about since before I even started working), I am finding it hard to convince myself to do anything. Somehow, the less I have to do for someone else, the less I want to do for myself (could your right-wing uncle be right???). I’ve been feeling a strange combination of boredom, contentment, excitement, and numbness all at the same time. My therapist wants me to focus on feeling my feelings in my body instead of just thinking them in my head, something I didn’t know could be done until our last appointment. It can be difficult to know whether to push through the boredom and numbness or to surrender to the urge to just do nothing for once. As someone who bases my self-worth on my accomplishments (0/10, do not recommend), I almost always choose to push forward, often at the expense of my sanity.
My newest dilemma is that I am running out of things to use to continue pushing forward. Is it possible to have too much freedom?
One of my biggest takeaways from my time as a preschool teacher was a phrase my co-teacher repeated to me often: whether they know it or not, kids want rules. It’s true, humans, particularly small ones, crave structure because it gives them an idea of how to behave and where to direct their energy. This was evident when comparing two classrooms of similarly-aged children. The teachers who created less structure in their classrooms and daily routines had trouble wrangling their often confused students because the children never knew what was coming next or what was expected of them.
Lately, I have been feeling like one of the students of a less-structured teacher. With an irregular work schedule and a rapidly shrinking list of chores at home (one can only clean out their closet so many times before they run out of clothes entirely), I am met with less and less structure, and less and less of an idea of what to do with myself. I have been telling myself that I would use my new abundance of time to get back into my old hobbies, namely painting. Since graduating ~beauty school~ (it is embarrassing to say that phrase but I really have no other way to describe it, so I will just mockingly put it in tildes for now) a month ago, I have laid one single layer of paint on a single canvas. What have I done with the rest of my time? I wish I could tell you.
Without the regimen of daily painting classes that I had in high school, I have been unable to coerce myself into creating any sort of art regularly. In the 6 years since graduating, I have completed a single painting. The trouble is that I rarely know what I want to make. It can be easy to type away at a keyboard until a newsletter or a poem starts to form, but to create a painting without a plan is nearly impossible. I know realistically that if I were to establish a routine of painting regularly, like I’ve done with writing, I would likely come up with new ideas more readily, and look at the world with a slightly different, more inspired perspective. This knowledge, while slightly reassuring, is unfortunately not enough to get me to actually pick up a paintbrush in the first place. I can crank out shitty little poems and publish them on the internet for god and everyone to see, but I am too afraid that I’ll paint something bad to try to paint anything good.
It is difficult to know if I’ve lost my love of painting, or if I just lack inspiration, or if art class was a necessary outlet for me at a time when I felt particularly stifled and painting is no longer as necessary for my well-being as it once was.
I also cannot get myself to embroider or read or any of the other various activities I say I enjoy doing but rarely actually partake in. I have been on a never-ending quest to spend less time on my phone, so most days I just end up bouncing from notebook to notebook, trying desperately to build some semblance of structure into my routine. Mostly, I waste time transitioning from one half-completed activity to the next. My life is a series of me telling everyone I need a hobby, finding one, and then never doing it.
Apparently, motivation can be created through momentum, but the problem is finding enough to get started in the first place. My most recent favorite thing to do is make a list of everything I need to get done in a day, do half the things on the list, then at the end of the day compile another list of every single thing I remember doing during the day, from sweeping the floor to making tea. It helps slightly with keeping me on track for the day and helps more with my recall of the day’s events, which has been abysmal. I would say lately, but it’s been bad for as long as I can remember (which famously is not very long). I did manage to start a single painting and a single embroidery project but have not been able to finish either one of them or fold the growing pile of clean laundry on my bed. I am, like so many other things, a work in progress.
seven, seven, seven!
every time I look at the clock it’s
3:33 or 12:34 and you’ve asked
me to stop telling you about it
I let a stranger borrow my phone and
she asked if it was an iPod and
if it could “make calls”
the houses in every neighborhood sell violets in little, little envelopes
I didn’t leave the house yesterday and now
I’m talking myself into, no
out of cutting my own bangs
thinking about one square mile
of service and smiles
why is every river named after where it ends
instead of where it begins?
I think my tongue is somehow bruised
the sun is going down which
makes me think it’s time for bed
but it’s not even time for dinner
I’m not the first to be tired
of these midday sunsets
but that won’t keep me from complaining
That’s it for me this week. I hope you enjoyed and will cry if you didn’t! Jk, I would understand.
lol (lots of love),
serena