So almost every part of me was shocked this morning when the psychologist’s response to ‘I’m functioning right at my capacity now due to these specific life rolls but the pinch point is just the next two months so I just need to put my Big Girl Panties on and survive for 8 weeks’ was ‘uh, no Amy, that’s called Pushing Through and we don’t do that anymore, ESPECIALLY because you’re sick’ and proceeded to have a conversation about ways we could trim down my plate and increase the amount of time I spend on down-regulating my nervous system.
Like, I’m sorry, what? You DON’T just have to push through when things are hard, even when it’s a specific, time-limited period?
It’s VALID to just be like……. nope?
I’m so confused.
Weirdly, this means blogging will hopefully become more regular (I know, I know, if we all had a dollar for every time I’ve said that) because DAMMIT ALL I *LIKE* BLOGGING and it’s fun and freeing and validating. Though I do need to find a way to take the metrics of how many people opened the email with the post off my dashboard, because that feels like Just Another Way to turn blogging into glorified social media, what with its metric-obsession.
Segue, I’m proud to say I’ve successfully broken up with social media? Becca Syme, about whom you will hear much more from me in the near future, I’m totally obsessed with her ecosystem right now and the Clifton Strengths are exploding my life in the most positive and beneficial way, has noted in many places in many ways at many times that the number one things a lot of writers can do to increase their writing productivity is stop checking social media first thing in the morning. Naturally, I balked HARD at this, which is generally a sign that it’s a Thing You Need To Do (the other one I’m continuing to balk hard at is Dean Wesley Smith’s recommendation to use a separate computer just and only for writing, hoo BOY am I digging my heels in and balking HARD at that one) (is it balk or baulk? baulk seems more like how we’d spell it in AU but if I switch to another tab to check I’ll lose my entire brain cell), and so over the course of the last idk two months I not only stopped checking social media first thing in the morning (I still check email), I now basically don’t check it at all and in news that will NATURALLY SURPRISE EVERYONE, my mental health is… well okay it’s not stable because that’s asking too much given my life circumstances right now, frankly, but it’s ALSO not being constantly under threat of destabilisation from external, uncontrollable factors in my feed, so that’s nice.
Given how much I was using Instagram, and not even to consume my feed but just to, like, share things in my stories as a way of capturing and sharing my day in my world of always-at-home, I-have-no-colleagues, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that not only am I not missing it, I’m actually now kind of resenting it when I’m forced to open Instagram because someone sent me something I need to check? Huh.
It’s almost like these platforms are designed to be a) addictive and b) unsettling and dysregulating because that feeds into a). *all the updsidedown smile emoji*. (Because happy, regulated people are not prone to addiction, so it’s literally against social media’s best interests to help us regulate our emotions. Ha.)
I have much to share and say and I’m learning a lot these days about useful things like emotional regulation and relationship communication and Strengths and my own brain and needs and boundaries and writing and how I write, but this is enough for today to just *bump* the blog to help reestablish the habit. Part of the resistance, of course, is that I feel obligated to fully explicate my ideas once I start on them, and that leads to unwieldy and somewhat tiring-to-write essays instead of the spontaneous, rambling blog posts we all know and love O:) *snicker*
So. Here I am, I did the thing, I touched the blog, and now I’m off to write for a while. Maybe an hour before I go home for a bit then head out again to pick the kids up from school.
[and in defiance of That Part Of My Brain that’s insisting that blogging be commercialised, I’m not even going to end this with a ‘sign up to my blog’ sign-off. ha. farewell.]