Excuses, excuses.
Mar. 8th, 2013 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randomling(This is an extremely sensitive topic for me; the no-advice request goes double here.)
So one of the things that needs to happen, for me to really recover, I think, is that I have to stop playing the victim. I have to stop being the little wombat who can't.
This is hard.
I have an excuse for everything. Even the stuff that isn't really excused by exhaustion or pain or lack of executive function is often excused by some random facet of psychological trauma. I am very good at making excuses, of explaining (to myself, to others) why I can't do things, and as a result my life has narrowed almost to a point. I rarely - actually, make that never - socialise in person. I feel unable to work or to figure out how I'm going to recover enough to work. I am, honestly, doing very little that's productive at the moment. I find it almost impossible to contribute to housework stuff (that's a major source of guilt).
Similar problems crop up with exercise or eating healthily or a hundred other things in my life.
And the truth is that I find it really hard to tell the difference between an excuse and a legitimate objection.
Another wrinkle: it's really hard sometimes to look past the initial excuse or objection and see a way to achieving my goal anyway. My energy is limited and to me it feels like it is more limited than a normal person's (I am, if it comes down to it, not even sure if this is itself an excuse or a legitimate problem, though I mostly lean towards legitimate problem). Finding workarounds itself takes energy. So I only have a limited amount of resources to devote to figuring out workarounds, all of which can take away some of the energy I was hoping to devote to accomplishing the goal in question.
The net result of this tends to be that I give up and don't make goals. The one exception to this lately has been the novel I'm writing - I'm actually pleasantly surprised how well that's going in terms of generating daily wordcount and advancing the plot and building a coherent narrative.
Oh, and there's another wrinkle, too. I tend to go in cycles with this stuff. Having looked up what seemed like decent definitions of manic and hypomanic (I don't have links anymore, this was ages ago), I don't think I'm matching those criteria. But I definitely have times of "do all the things!" and times of "do none of the things!" and when I'm feeling more excited about acquiring projects it's very easy for me to overload myself. This makes it harder when I'm feeling lower, because I've then made all these commitments (if only to myself - I'm starting to get very careful about what I promise to others) and I feel unable to fulfill them.
So. Excuses and objections. Workarounds. Cycles. I don't know how to even begin sorting this mess out.
Excuses and objections
One of my mental blocks is that I get very cranky about having to do activities I don't enjoy. I am not proud of this part of myself, but it does me no favours to pretend it isn't there. On the other hand, perhaps that crankiness is not in itself something that should dictate what I do and don't do. (There's a part of me, however, that objects strongly to forcing myself to do things I already know will make me feel intensely miserable.) I'm not sure how to work around this feeling or how to resolve this. Perhaps more processing on this topic is required.
Maybe I can start by making a note of what objections I have to doing various activities. An objections log? I often find it's easier for me to work with things when they are set out in black and white, so perhaps this is a sensible idea. I think I will try it, maybe starting with some of the big-deal things that I really want to be doing on a regular basis but am not.
Workarounds
Workarounds are sometimes easy to find and sometimes hard. I think that having a list of objections will be a really good start with workarounds, because of the aforementioned setting-stuff-down-in-black-and-white concept.
The one thing I thought of was that I would set aside some time to work on this, but I notice I have an objection! In this case, my objection is that I often set aside time to do X, Y or Z, but then don't actually do it at the scheduled time. This means I start attaching guilt to the activity and then it gets much, much harder to do it. So maybe a scheduled time is not really a great idea. On the other hand, if I don't schedule time, I'm anxious that I'll forget about it.
This seems to be a Catch-22 with no particularly good solution. Schedule and ignore, or fail to schedule and forget? Maybe what I'll do is schedule a day rather than a time, and set a reminder. And I can maybe start with the smallest piece possible - I can take one activity that isn't happening and figure out a workaround for one objection. That's a start.
Cycle
Ugh, it feels like there's no good solution for the cycles of pick-it-up-and-drop-it.
Seriously. I haven't been keeping track of when I'm "up" vs "down" so I have no idea if this is predictable in any way. So maybe I should find a way of tracking my cycles. At least that way I'll maybe have an idea whether I can predict these cycles or not?
Are there specific indicators that I can notice? Should I make a one-line note about how I'm feeling? Should I give each day a number? Sometimes it feels like it varies over a day, but I think most days are either mostly-up or mostly-down.
It's hard to figure this out, but I notice I'm starting to obsess over the "right" way to do it; I think that, as with software, the best thing to do is probably to get together the least complicated thing that could probably work and then iterate it over time. So this system is going to start with a notebook in Evernote, and a note for every day I remember with some ramblings over how active/inactive I feel.
In sum...
In sum, there really is no in sum. I have a few ideas how I might make some movement on this, but no big conclusion has been drawn. That's often the way with life, isn't it?
No wonder we like stories with Epiphanies and Emotional Resolutions. So often, life doesn't work that way, even when we want it to.
So one of the things that needs to happen, for me to really recover, I think, is that I have to stop playing the victim. I have to stop being the little wombat who can't.
This is hard.
I have an excuse for everything. Even the stuff that isn't really excused by exhaustion or pain or lack of executive function is often excused by some random facet of psychological trauma. I am very good at making excuses, of explaining (to myself, to others) why I can't do things, and as a result my life has narrowed almost to a point. I rarely - actually, make that never - socialise in person. I feel unable to work or to figure out how I'm going to recover enough to work. I am, honestly, doing very little that's productive at the moment. I find it almost impossible to contribute to housework stuff (that's a major source of guilt).
Similar problems crop up with exercise or eating healthily or a hundred other things in my life.
And the truth is that I find it really hard to tell the difference between an excuse and a legitimate objection.
Another wrinkle: it's really hard sometimes to look past the initial excuse or objection and see a way to achieving my goal anyway. My energy is limited and to me it feels like it is more limited than a normal person's (I am, if it comes down to it, not even sure if this is itself an excuse or a legitimate problem, though I mostly lean towards legitimate problem). Finding workarounds itself takes energy. So I only have a limited amount of resources to devote to figuring out workarounds, all of which can take away some of the energy I was hoping to devote to accomplishing the goal in question.
The net result of this tends to be that I give up and don't make goals. The one exception to this lately has been the novel I'm writing - I'm actually pleasantly surprised how well that's going in terms of generating daily wordcount and advancing the plot and building a coherent narrative.
Oh, and there's another wrinkle, too. I tend to go in cycles with this stuff. Having looked up what seemed like decent definitions of manic and hypomanic (I don't have links anymore, this was ages ago), I don't think I'm matching those criteria. But I definitely have times of "do all the things!" and times of "do none of the things!" and when I'm feeling more excited about acquiring projects it's very easy for me to overload myself. This makes it harder when I'm feeling lower, because I've then made all these commitments (if only to myself - I'm starting to get very careful about what I promise to others) and I feel unable to fulfill them.
So. Excuses and objections. Workarounds. Cycles. I don't know how to even begin sorting this mess out.
Excuses and objections
One of my mental blocks is that I get very cranky about having to do activities I don't enjoy. I am not proud of this part of myself, but it does me no favours to pretend it isn't there. On the other hand, perhaps that crankiness is not in itself something that should dictate what I do and don't do. (There's a part of me, however, that objects strongly to forcing myself to do things I already know will make me feel intensely miserable.) I'm not sure how to work around this feeling or how to resolve this. Perhaps more processing on this topic is required.
Maybe I can start by making a note of what objections I have to doing various activities. An objections log? I often find it's easier for me to work with things when they are set out in black and white, so perhaps this is a sensible idea. I think I will try it, maybe starting with some of the big-deal things that I really want to be doing on a regular basis but am not.
Workarounds
Workarounds are sometimes easy to find and sometimes hard. I think that having a list of objections will be a really good start with workarounds, because of the aforementioned setting-stuff-down-in-black-and-white concept.
The one thing I thought of was that I would set aside some time to work on this, but I notice I have an objection! In this case, my objection is that I often set aside time to do X, Y or Z, but then don't actually do it at the scheduled time. This means I start attaching guilt to the activity and then it gets much, much harder to do it. So maybe a scheduled time is not really a great idea. On the other hand, if I don't schedule time, I'm anxious that I'll forget about it.
This seems to be a Catch-22 with no particularly good solution. Schedule and ignore, or fail to schedule and forget? Maybe what I'll do is schedule a day rather than a time, and set a reminder. And I can maybe start with the smallest piece possible - I can take one activity that isn't happening and figure out a workaround for one objection. That's a start.
Cycle
Ugh, it feels like there's no good solution for the cycles of pick-it-up-and-drop-it.
Seriously. I haven't been keeping track of when I'm "up" vs "down" so I have no idea if this is predictable in any way. So maybe I should find a way of tracking my cycles. At least that way I'll maybe have an idea whether I can predict these cycles or not?
Are there specific indicators that I can notice? Should I make a one-line note about how I'm feeling? Should I give each day a number? Sometimes it feels like it varies over a day, but I think most days are either mostly-up or mostly-down.
It's hard to figure this out, but I notice I'm starting to obsess over the "right" way to do it; I think that, as with software, the best thing to do is probably to get together the least complicated thing that could probably work and then iterate it over time. So this system is going to start with a notebook in Evernote, and a note for every day I remember with some ramblings over how active/inactive I feel.
In sum...
In sum, there really is no in sum. I have a few ideas how I might make some movement on this, but no big conclusion has been drawn. That's often the way with life, isn't it?
No wonder we like stories with Epiphanies and Emotional Resolutions. So often, life doesn't work that way, even when we want it to.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-08 09:36 pm (UTC)Ohhhhhh gpoy. :/ I often wonder where the line is b/t being kind to myself -- cutting myself some slack & not being such a perfectionist -- &... just making excuses. I think it doesn't help that so much discourse in therapy seems to be about whether a person *wants* to get better: am I not trying? Am I a bad patient or just a sick one? etc.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-09 12:25 am (UTC)-- randomthing, you are as ever brave and inspiring and I need to borrow more of your ideas. <3
no subject
Date: 2013-03-09 12:15 am (UTC)