Hello, beautiful souls!
Writing after 8 days feels so not normal. The last post went live on June 22 and we have entered July today. So many things were not done in these 8 days but the big one was no productive time spent on my desk. Here I am again, getting acquainted with the keyboard once again. I also missed replying to your comments and I was you to trust me that I value you very much and the reason behind my lack of social connection was something personal.
At first, I felt the need to take a small break
to complete all the pending tasks like finding doctors, getting my eye sight tested, yada yada. But turns out, I had been dealing with a personal loss of a kind. My effort to not deal with it was by numbing myself with unlimited youtube videos, and Netflix movies. I kept telling myself that I can be back next month and right now I just have no energy to do anything. Last night, it felt like everyone was moving ahead in life around me while I was stuck on the couch watching Kardashians. It is sickening but also very humbling to find yourself so weak sometimes. Life should not stop like this and I always told myself that I will pull myself out by 1st July but just think how many of us stay there, watching constant movies and numbing the difficult feelings. I certainly have done it and find myself back at it like a coping mechanism but there is no real coping happening here.
This is a heart-to-heart with you all, my readers. I am asking, sharing and being human with you. Why are we all like this? Why are we all not dealing with that icky feeling of accepting something bad about our life & ourselves? Instead, we choose to numb the pain with drugs and for most of us the drug is our dopamine addiction to contact social media/ videos, etc.
Brene Brown has said that we cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
For me, sometimes I find myself desperately lonely in the US which is strange because I actually really like the life I am building here. But yes, I miss the familiarity of knowing. I see my family doing stuff together, my friends doing things with their family and I do feel like I am missing out on a lot. In US, everyone stays in their lanes. You do not drop at people’s houses, you don’t have someone to be a shoulder to you when you need someone and this whole lack of real community does get to me sometimes. I also have been still getting my footing here. Where on the one hand I feel this immense pressure to get into a job, earn money and be able to support myself & family. On the other, I feel like I lack the motivation, energy & desire to really do anything else but write. Is this a catch-22?
I received some very emotional comments last week
on how so many of us are in that stage of life where we feel this insane desire to feel like we are making a difference in our life but then we lack the energy to act on anything. Why is that? I know I am numbing my emotions by giving myself these dopamine hits of videos. I wonder if we all are doing that? I do know and understand that any action takes effort and effort can be painful as humans, we just do not want to feel the pain and so we run in the opposite direction. For me, there is also this fear of failure that lurks around me at all attempts and so I just don’t do the thing so I won’t fail. But is there more to this?
Joshua Fields Millburn said in his ‘The Minimalists Podcast’, the thing you want is never the thing you want. We think we desire people and possessions and prominence, but what we really desire is the feeling that arises from those things. If we interrogate our wants, we can locate what we truly desire. (More.)
It may feel like we are drowning but we do come up for air
from time to time and it is probably important to act quickly when that happens. That probably will give the feeling of some sense of living. These are the things I did when I came out of my couch in the last 10 or so days.
Went for a coffee friend date with someone I acquainted
Went to NYC to get a book and sat in the library for quite a while reading
Booked a doctor’s appointment which is in 2 weeks
Worked on all the rest of the pending tasks
Got a project in UI /Ux and started working on that
Read at least 10 pages every day as part of 75 hard challenge
Worked out twice which was 2 walks on most days as part of 75 hard challenge
I & Mr. Hanson went out with a couple we recently met
Swim practiced three times and the last time I was able to swim for 3 strokes
Started listening to some new podcasts which are on topics I usually do not listen - statistics, economics & fashion
Re-organized kitchen
Reduced my average blood glucose to 6.0% from 6.4% in the last 30 days
Learned to make Moroccan lamb tajine
It may feel like I did a lot but no I mostly just sat on my couch and watched a lot of Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube. Honestly!
But it has stopped from today how long can you stay underwater?
Congratulations!