I cannot figure out how to make this a sustainable venture for the life of me. I started this ~bl0g~ about a year ago with the proclamation that I would write, for writing’s sake — meaning I would write without regard for perfection or fear of judgment. I would instead, write, because engaging in an activity in pursuit of my own enjoyment is enough of a reason at all… No yeah I literally said that. Not just now, but also a year ago, when I started this, all bright eyed and cautiously optimistic that a weekly biweekly monthly quarterly …. EVER(??)LY newsletter would flow from my fingers with the ease.
It’s not as easy as I thought to unlearn 2+ decades of editing yourself. Rewriting sentences and scrapping ideas for the sake of others and in the protection of my own ego (like I did just now, deleting the sentence that lived between the previous and the next). It’s not as easy to recognize that not every single thing I write is going to be DAZZLING, and to know that it certainly does not need to be. For so long I had written with intent: getting into college, getting the A, printing the front page story, climbing some ladder, whether it be imagined or real. It’s not as easy to be gentle on yourself when your sentence is a run-on that would certainly be cut 3 clauses on tracked changes or when you don’t write the newsletter you said you would— not last week, not the week before, and not the 12 weeks before that.
Something I’ve been trying to make peace with is that perfection cannot get in the way of progress. I’ve always found myself to be an all-or-nothing person, or, as my father would call it, having a tendency to ‘overcorrect.’ Lonely and bored? Make 16 dinner plans, register for 4 online classes, and take on 3 side hustles. Burnt out and exhausted? Cancel your ClassPass account, and put a 2-week moratorium on planning anything. And so the cycle repeats.
Outside of the pacing of my social life, I find myself swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other on a basis so frequent, it’s one of the few things I can count on with regularity. I’ve recently been trying to ‘build a relationship with movement,’ a phrase my friend Jamie pointed out could only be uttered by someone in therapy (#true). So with my therapist, I reflected on the last time I had such a ‘relationship’ — I was walking 10+ miles daily as an antidote to my anxiety/depression, carving worn circles around my college neighborhood with my quick paces. Once I came to realize that walking, despite being a helpful coping mechanism, was not going to alleviate the extent of my mental stress, and especially when it occurred at such exorbitant levels, I put exercise on the back-end. It was a tool to leverage in case of crisis, but not something to build sustainably into my life for consistent, long-term effects. When I reintroduced movement, I did so with the recognition that I didn’t want to build something so unsustainable that I would find myself burnt out and spent, never to book another Pilates class again (the horror). But there I went again, filling my schedule with spinning and long walks and back to back yogas and finding myself angry when I couldn’t fit in the workout, plus the social plans, the 4 errands on my to-do list, and oh wait, have you even just sat for a moment in the last 11 days…
The point is — that middle-ground is what works long-term. And it has not been my friend. I tend to move in spurts, whether it be exercise, socializing, academics, or pursuing something like this. I wind up to bat (#sports), make big proclamations and dedications, promising myself I will write EVERY WEEK, exercise EVERY DAY, have a date night EVERY SINGLE WEDNESDAY. But sustainability has been hard for me to find, and what’s worse is that I punish myself when I cannot meet the expectation I’ve set. If I miss SoulCycle this week, then what’s the point of doing it next. If I forgot to journal last night and the night before, does it matter if I do tonight? It does. It will.
Another thing I won’t be perfect at: unlearning the edits I make on myself, the unrealistic expectations I set, cannot reach, and beat myself up over not meeting. But I’m trying. I want need to make peace with the fact that maybe I won’t write again for another six months. I won’t be able to go to the SoulCycle class every single week. I won’t be happy doing 18 plans back-to-back and I won’t feel fulfilled with an empty calendar either. What I’m seeking does not lie on one end or the other, but rather, somewhere in the middle. It’s time I get comfortable there.
#sports
Consider me DAZZLED