Enough with the digital blah de blah
An extra length, extra strength essay about feeling the summer grind in all the weird places
What’s the difference between someone who is prolific and someone who is paralysed by the thought of doing something?
This is something I often wrestle with. For these are the two sides of me.
The dreamer-doer is the one who herds words into chaotic pens and welcomes them in their dog-like over-exuberance. I play, I wash, I groom. And boom! That little sentence or phrase sits neatly with wiggling intensity inside the copy. I rescue the ideas others leave behind. I raise the ones no one saw. My head is filled with joy at the thought of another day giving new life to tired phrases and ideas. Of seeing them play-bow across the page before transforming into the good little copy-shaped companions they should be.
And then there is the fevered procrastinator. The one who cleans out their inbox obsessively as some kind of magical bedrock property to creativity. Tweezing out the importance of repetitive labour to Nowhereville. The one who starts writing something only to lose steam two thirds of the way in. I am fluffing cushions on the internet, picking lint from my hard drive.
Process, formula, process, bing!
A conveyor belt of mindless action finds it’s satisfaction in pretending this is living.
All the while, sinking deeper and deeper into judgement, self-blame and the desert wastelands of another day with nothing but tidy to show for it.
Knowing all the things does not help. Not when the brain insists the pressure is too great, the world is too bright, and the movement through the alphabet so meaningless.
It surprises me still that I can know that:
· I need exercise but choose giving up in swathes of internet detritus over leaving my desk and gaining perspective while staring at the sea
· The clever people with all their clever ideas and clever control on social media haven’t got it figured out more than me. Yet I wish, oh how I wish, their mask would slip occasionally
· The tang within my head, like some sour liquid bruise, that will punish me now and drown me later that makes choosing what to do feel as though to make that choice is to lose in ways my mind cannot articulate but clangs the bell of horror anyway
Under procrastination lies the fear – and that action is the magic sword. The vine cutting, Indiana Jones slicing through that misery. And yet, all I can think of is the childhood joke:
Q: What were Tarzan’s last words?
A: Who greased that vine?
For once, the newsletter hasn’t flowed. I haven’t grabbed the keyboard, touched the wincing pain of some ailing nerve within, and decided to share it with the world.
This month, I have been bored, grumpy and far too fucking clever for my own good.
I am exhausted in a way I only get right in that longest-week-in-the-working calendar way. You know the feeling, I am sure. Where the holidays shadowbox you from the outside, begging you to move forward but feeling oh so far away.
Blame it on lockdowns, Covid, another bushfire season, a series of hard choices and equally hard encounters, my first birthday without my Dad, a gaping chasm where a funeral should have been, the impending pressure of knowing both the air conditioner and the hot water system are limping to their end of days, or the potential of yet another festive season spent being excluded and judged.
That seems like a reasonable list.
Or maybe it is because everything feels so desperately untidy. I pick up things to pack away and find me distracted not by the sense of accomplishment but by the many waving weeding that seem to sprout in its place. Red flagged emails, all neat and lined up and ready to go – well they lead to the possibility of someone making more requests. Of my brain, of my time. They come attached with changes and stories I haven’t got the brainspace for yet.
Yet.
My to do list is a series of short things and medium undertakings that says, “you haven’t done me yet!”
Instant messages bleat and blare, “you haven’t responded to me yet!”
Mail I wanted to write hasn’t found the envelope yet. The post box is not heaving. Yet. The postmaster hasn’t seen me yet.
In the lack of scratching the creative itch, the talons of self-doubt descend.
Are people talking? Are they tsk, tsk, tsking away?
There are things to be made. Stories to write. Courses to plan. A person to be.
You are not there yet.
Are we there yet?
Will we ever be?
Yet, here I am. Talking to you. Feeling better than I did the last three attempts. Still not entirely convinced. But doing it anyway.
Contentment as an abstract concept
Sometimes, I wish I could be content.
In theory, I know money, the internet, likes, and the majority of what I work on day-to-day means sod all in the grand scheme of things.
I can still be an anarchist. But I can also long for room service.
People puzzle at my anxiety. Why I often have that wide-eyed, erratic jumping, post-puppy bath face on me in person and online.
It’s because I am not dulled anymore. I am not wadded beneath distraction.
I feel so keenly.
Some days, I’d like to go back to the days where drinking allowed me to switch off for a while. Where the grey smoke of the bong made the colours a little less sharp.
Where to unfeel is to be cool, calm and in control. If not more than a little bit avoidant and addicted.
People have all kinds of theories about anxiety.
It’s unrealised potential. It’s the fear of the unknown. It’s insecurity.
No wait, it’s family history and biology. Or blood sugar, heart disease or asthma making you unable to breathe properly.
It’s looking too much at the big picture. Or getting caught in the detail.
It is trauma. It is conditioning. It is fear.
Too much time spent in the future and not enough in the present.
A failure to stop overthinking. A failure to stop externalising.
Rejection of uncertainty and discomfort with a lack of control.
It is caring too much of what others think. But not caring enough about others.
All the things and none of the things sprouting like unwanted antenna in an ever moving, always judging, always striving world.
For me, anxiety is when you and the purpose are mismatched. Like one of those kids spheres with the shapes that go in the right hole.
At other times, it’s simply a form of sensory overload. All the feelings, all the mitigating circumstances to a situation, all the flotsam peeling off people as they speak. An information overload that propels my compassion to try and see the other point of view while almost certainly becoming dizzyingly ill from seeing too much from all directions. Like a 3d camera, only ones that scan feelings and categorises them as a mix of perfume counter and city garbage truck day smells.
I keep telling myself there is something/nothing wrong with me because I can’t build the sales jazz hands. I can’t do the angry rant at someone else’s expense, and this is a curse and a cure. I am not demanding perfection from people around me in instant chats all over the internet. And this makes me morally good and also very, very alone.
The voice inside me that raised me on a staple diet of exclusion and longing eviscerates me for wanting to be different. To stop avoiding playing the game.
Physically, I came to terms with difference because I had to. You cannot un-ring the bell of cerebral palsy. And for this (people are often shocked to hear), I am glad.
Not for the pain or the process. Or the surgeries, past, present and likely, future.
Disability forces growth in ways that a lot of people do not understand. Do not want to understand, because it would mean admitting their role in forcing other people to grow. Through cruelty. Through exclusion. Through acting out and setting standards those of us who don’t abide by the unobtainable position of health none of us ever truly meet.
Mentally though, I sometimes wonder. Wonder not about my mental health so much as why I try to be normal here, too. For normal should be struck from the dictionary. Normal should be dropped like a football and punted out the door.
Normal is fucking boring. It’s making money by playing the game. It’s sanitising your creativity.
It’s in someone telling you that you should write more like them, so it’s universally accepted.
That you should keep to word limits. Think of the SEO. And don’t forget your sales funnel.
Rescue all those low hanging fruit. Ignore the stench of rot as it permeates through the door.
It’s factory farming creativity and measuring it in ways that support the narrative that nothing has value unless it has a price ticket attached.
Me to me: Why does that feel so obscene?
But as hard as it can be at times to feel oddly spiky in a world of marshmallow, I wouldn’t ask for it another way.
Me to you: Thank you, I love you. There is hope
Can you tell I grew up inhaling the words of Edward Albee, going deep and bobbing up right at the moment where your brain says, “I’m not sure I can stay here anymore?”
I am not afraid of Virginia Wolf. Not today, anyway.
As we sit here together and gain a tan in only the way a digital device can, I want to reach in and take your hand. I want to tell you thank you for listening. For being here. For pottering past to unblock me. To make me feel not so alone. To not want to be normal.
You, dear reader, you give me hope.
I want to acknowledge I have said too much and not enough. And that your holding space has been both scary and kind.
Because the very thought of talking to you like this has helped me.
Not to sell. Not to set up the next great promo or kick arse workshop. <insert all those clickable links here. That’s for the footer, after all>.
But to get on with my day. To actually do the things I need to do. To be the business owner, the client server, and the creative person I need to be.
Thank you for letting me be vulnerable in the way I need to be. And to likely feeling as discontented, fly paper stuck and exhausted by the hoo-har and flim flam as I seem to be.
If you actually want to share some of this camaraderie before we put 2021 to bed with a Kong and a tug rope, here is where I will be:
Jungle accountability podders, Haylz and I invite you to an informal chat to tidy up (and try to make sense of) another Covid year on December 3rd.
I’m also taking you through what it takes to identify opportunities. That’s December 16th.
If you want to hang out, we’re having a Very Jungle Christmas by sitting around with food and craft projects on Zoom on December 17th. It’s a free for all free-for-all in the best possible way.
Love and other ways to calm your jitters,
Rebekah
Enough with the digital blah de blah
Would love to be part of the debrief! Thanks for making me feel less alone in my inbox cleaning frenzy while the pile grows of things to do!!!