19/04/2020

Lockdown, week 3. I’m going up and down. Drank wine on Friday night but it didn’t actually do much for me which was annoying. I wasn’t going to have anything to drink, the kind of mental debate I have with myself beforehand was so ridiculous, and then eventually I thought the hang over can’t be worse than sitting for the rest of the night going back and forth and back and forth like this. So I had some drinks but it didn’t go down particularly well, and I went to sleep feeling about as frustrated as I had been beforehand. I am feeling frustrated at the moment. I’m stuck in this netflix fuelled cycle of not doing much, and then doing something which is active and productive but it never makes me feel that different. I had a thought the other day that I’m used to having this severe focus, when I was young as I was like this, and then up until last year and loosing my job I was following a path. I’ve found that now I’m struggling to push myself into another one.

I keep avoiding the phrase, just being lazy, because the truth is I’m fairly depressed most days. I’ve always felt that living with the condition I do it’s better to to kind to oneself, rather than taking on the negative language, but truth it I wonder if I’m at the stage where the opposite is true- I actually need to be harder on myself now, rather than not. If I want to keep moving forwards, even though at the moment I have absolutely no idea where that forward will take me, could take me. I go back and forth between telling myself I don’t need to put this pressure on myself, to thinking that putting this pressure on myself would actually make me better. I keep thinking I need to take a day and research where I want to start looking for volunteering work, or part time work. I have this dream of working part time at a bookstore, waterstones, so when the lock down is over I’m going to visit Croydon once a week and check out for hiring signs in their windows. And then also I’m going to volunteer for extinction rebellion. I was umming and aahing about joining the labour party and volunteering for them, or with the Green party and same, but I think that the best place for me to be would be extinction rebellion, that’s what’s really calling out to me now. I need to spend some decent time researching. I’ve spent too long in this state of mind now, I am basically just being lazy, as much as my mind will come up with reasons to state that I was pushing myself so hard for so many years and still beating myself up then, the past is the past and at the moment I am just being lazy.

I’m going to watch some Brandon Sanderson writing lectures now, this is a good thing to do. Then get back to planning.

I have to slowly let go of all of the negative emotion that this illness has made me feel. There are positive aspects to it but I need to start acknowledging the bad aspects to it as well- the aspects that pull me back into a hole, pull me back into non courageous activity.

It’s Monday tomorrow, start of a new week. And I will be ready for it.