No distractions, or: The battle of procrastination
It’s really hard to sit with yourself, with no distractions. I imagine a lot of people are struggling with this right now.
I’ve been travelling for two months now, moving around quite a lot-I think the longest I’ve spent anywhere was the 6 days I spent in Hanoi. For the last 14 days, I’ve been on Koh Tao in Thailand, 9 of those days in a house share.
I’ve found myself feeling more down, and less motivated to do things recently. Part of this is the come down from the decision I had to make about staying or leaving (see my last post for why this was so difficult for me); I have been thinking of my son a lot and trying to sit with my grief a bit.
But I can’t do that all day, it’s exhausting. I’m on a paradise island, so I keep telling myself that I should get out and go to the beach, but somehow the motivation leaves me and I tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow instead. Part of this is that I am walking everywhere, which is tough as it’s 37 degrees and over 70% humidity most days. Walking around in that temperature is exhausting, especially if you’re overweight- add in that you have to wear a mask and I feel somewhat justified in seeking to avoid it.
It’s more than that though, I know. This feeling I have right now is familiar. I don’t really have a purpose right now, and that is incredibly difficult for me. Without much to focus on, or to occupy my time with, my mind wanders and often lands on something that makes me sad, angry or depressed. Thoughts about my last relationship, my son’s death, father’s death, getting older and my lack of career direction all compete for attention and I find myself turning to YouTube and Netflix to shut them out.
I felt so different in the first month of my travels. You can see it in the posts I wrote: I was full of emotion and released a lot of that for the first time in a long while. I felt like I was gaining insight into my behaviour on a daily basis; I actually felt myself changing. I have a vivid imagination, and have always tried to imagine a better or different self before embarking on a journey to become that person. That “person I’m going to become” has changed quite a lot over the years, often she wasn’t a person I could totally relate to. It’s not that I couldn’t really relate to her, it was more that I either didn’t think I would ever be that person, or that she was someone else’s version of the ideal me.
God, it’s really taxing even thinking about this. I am finding it really difficult to remain concentrated on writing this piece; it’s as if my mind hasn’t fully thought this out and is too tired to see where these thoughts might go. I feel a real resistance to going down this thought path. I keep thinking about the ice cream I have in my freezer, or the next episode of the show I was watching. Then I think about getting on my scooter (I drove it around a little this morning with the help of one of my housemates, the first time I’ve ever driven a scooter) and going to the beach, but I’m actually a little afraid of doing that.
This is such a familiar feeling to me. I get flummoxed because I am feeling some strong emotion, so my mind immediately thinks of things to distract myself from it. And then I find myself with a list of things I could do rather than pause and allow myself to feel the emotion. I get caught up in these distractions and then, when I finally switch off at night, I can’t sleep as the emotions I was trying to avoid in the first place come back with a vengeance.
As I said before, this is all very familiar. I know this routine like the back of my hand. It’s harder to avoid when you don’t have a job, friends around or a relationship to distract you. After my son’s death, I decided to take most of the maternity leave I was still entitled to, as I realised that the grief was something that deserved my undivided attention for a while. In the beginning, the rawness of that grief overwhelmed everything. I sobbed for days, a never ending flood of tears that didn’t seem to stop. Everything and nothing provoked them, fat droplets falling from my eyes, occasionally soaking my clothes. I have cried my fair share of tears in my life but nothing like those of grief for my father and son.
The cathartic effect of crying was immense and immediate. All the sadness and pain and anger was soothed by the tears, temporarily washed away by the flood. I was never someone who could cry in public, but this overwhelmed me and I revelled in my new found ability to cry at an advert on a bus. Even now, reliving those days, I’m welling up. And even now, after my brief surge of emotion, I feel exhausted, and like I need to stop writing this, I need to stop reliving it because it’s too painful.
I think we are all terrified of sadness and strong emotion. Somewhere, we feel that we will be totally overwhelmed by it and unable to control ourselves.
After Jamil died, I realised I had been trying to control my emotions for my whole life. I decided to give in to them for once, I encouraged my most acute sadness, grief and anger to just be there. As I said, in the beginning, this was easy as I just couldn’t control it. But as the weeks went by, old habits returned, albeit somewhat diminished. My old friend numbness reappeared and I gradually sank into his comforting arms. I had no routine, and apart from weekly therapy sessions, I had nothing on my To Do list most weeks. Days were spent either in bed or on my couch, watching hours of YouTube or Netflix, cooking and eating junk food. I felt little emotion, and whatever was able to pierce through my beige numbness seemed to manifest only as tears and then be washed away.
Thinking about it now, it felt like being on a very boring rollercoaster: I would go along the tracks for a while, oblivious to time and distance passing but somewhere recognising that I was on a very slight incline. And then, I would suddenly reach the top and crash down to the bottom in dramatic fashion, only to return to the path with the gentle incline.
Often, the crash would happen just before my therapy sessions: on my way there, I would suddenly feel scared that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about as I had had such a bland week. The pressure would somehow bring some insight which I could talk about in my session. It’s not that the insights weren’t real, they were and I grew more in those sessions than any others I’ve done, but it felt like I could only tolerate that insight and the pain it brought for a few hours each week-usually the hour before and several hours after my session.
The first month of my travels, I felt like those months of sudden, surreptitious insight were paying off. I had finally broken free of my 40 year old cocoon and was able to live all my emotions out as they happened. Ironically, I felt a real sense of calm at this.
Now, after two weeks of sitting in the same place, numbness has returned a little. I recognise now, this very moment actually, that it’s not as bad as before. I am able to recognise that it’s happening, and can also resist it a little by trying to meditate and write. Half the battle with me has always been recognising emotions and patterns as they are happening and I’m getting closer to being able to do that most of the time.
I recognised the other side of the battle last year: once I recognise that I’m struggling, how to respond? Do I give in to the temptation to distract myself (reasoning that perhaps it’s just too much for my mind to take and that it makes sense to take my time approaching the pain) or do I just fight that urge and force myself to so try and deal with it. Writing this piece has felt like an example of that. I started it yesterday, only writing the first two lines as a note to remind myself of what I was thinking about.
I returned to it today, after a morning of distractions -I cleaned my room, clothes, drove my scooter for the first time and cooked, as well as listened/watched an hour and a half long interview with an MC I love. I am feeling anxiety around getting on that scooter and actually driving on a road with it, and I am struggling with the dilemma of forcing myself to do it (potentially dangerous) or waiting until tomorrow. I’m proud of myself for persevering with this piece- at several points I’ve almost given up, but I’m finishing it nonetheless. That’s progress enough for today I think, the scooter can wait til tomorrow.
