InsaneJournal

Current mood:

thoughtful

I Didn't Even Have Enough Words For a Cute Title
Posit 1: We go through repeating cycles of behavior.

Posit 2: Behavior is fractal: how we do one thing is how we do everything.

When I first make up my mind--and that's a very specific state of mind, making up my mind--then I'm completely on pointe; I'm determined, I'm focused, I'm unstoppable. And I can keep that state of mind almost indefinitely...as long as nothing interrupts me.

And then, when something does, it's nigh unto impossible for me to get that momentum back again. Or so my history would tell me.

With Weight Watchers, I lost 100+ lbs. Then the pilings dissolved out from under my life (lost a 15 year friendship, lost boyfriend, hated job, mom's appendix exploded, she almost died from sepsis and we discovered her first cancer) and... There just wasn't time for any more than there was. Worrying about what I ate just wasn't a possible part of the equation. And that wasn't the end of everything, but it was the start, where I fell off a path that I was on.

With exercise, it was the fatigue. At that point, we still didn't know about the cancer, but I was just SO TIRED. I was barely making it through my work day (and I mean that--barely; there were times I didn't think I'd make it the block and a half from the jobsite to our parking garage without collapsing). I didn't have anything spare to be able to get to the gym and do my usual 4mi on the elliptical. I didn't have the focus or energy to do my yoga. And I've never recovered from that stumble.

With my writing, it was my own cancer. And I've gone on about this ad nauseum and I don't feel like I need to rehash my emotional brow clutching about the difference in my creativity between then and now, but even working within the confines of what I have and am now, I struggle to recover the simple mechanical habits that have little to nothing to do with creativity. Simple things like sitting myself down to write every day.

I do pretty well with it during pressured situations like NaNo (or mini_nanowrimo, as the case may be) but left on my own, without specific deadlines, I'm not nearly as scrupulous. I still write more days than I don't, to be sure, but I miss the steadiness of that daily practice. And all my attempts to recover that consistency have been short-lived and inattentive. And though I feel (intellectually) like it IS and SHOULD BE in my power, the actuality is that I feel helpless to alter my situation. And I don't know how to get past that mental stumbling block. No amount of positive self-talk has made a difference. I feel at such an incredible loss to affect my own circumstances. And I'm not sure what the solution to that is, other than what I'm already doing, which is simple persistence.

It's just that simple persistence can be extremely frustrating, quite often.

Wrote a couple hundred words on AKB today. Poked at Appetite, but I don't think I wrote more than a sentence worth of words on it. I feel like I have so much inside me about this story; so many things I want to do and say, so many ways I could spiral off the central story, if so inclined. Frustrating isn't even the WORD for how I feel about my inability to call all this creativeness out of me in any meaningful way.