Day 169: Stubborn

Oh hello there. Hello hello. I am very self-conscious right now. I'm finding writing is making me very self-conscious. Well that's just the way it is. Got to put those words down. Got to put up this blog. So write and write and power on through regardless.

I was working today. I was at work. It was... no, let us not talk of it. Afterwards I came home from work, and that was good, except I was tired from the work, and my brain had turned to gravy. But that was also the fault of me staying up till half two last night editing more photos, which I didn't mean to do but then I did it, and then I'd done it and there was nothing I could do. 

Oh well. I've cooked a meal this evening, with actual vegetables, so I'm pleased with that. I've edited more photos. Put photos on Facebook for my family who don't have Instagram to see. I did my Instagram post for work earlier, and I did one for my own page after that. Did a gratitude list. I'm doing this writing now.

Small steps. One foot in front of the other. Don't look down, don't get dizzy, just keep on concentrating a foot ahead. Yes. It's a kind of vertigo I suffer from. Writers' vertigo. As soon as I start writing I feel myself to be dangerously high, and I watch myself writing, turning myself inside out for the world to see, and my head swims and I get wobbly and I panic, and suddenly I can't move forward or go back, I'm paralysed, like stage fright, like the fear at the edge of a cliff.

But I've got over this, in the past, time and time again. I was doing much better with it, then recently I was doing worse, and now I feel myself ready to face the problem again. I'll keep going, and it will get easier, as it always does.

There are things, and if you do these things you can succeed. It's true in anything. In learning the trombone or building a rocket ship or setting up your own meringue business.

For me right now writing is a thin mountain path beside a fiery abyss. Well then I simply focus on my feet, lift one up, find a good spot ahead on the ground, put my foot down, transfer my weight, repeat with the other side. Over and over, and eventually I'm back into bucolic meadows.

If you're struggling with mental health, this is my only advice to you. Find very simple tasks that you can complete, and complete them. Make a plan for how to go to the shops. Lay out the steps for getting through the shower. Create a foolproof guide for getting out of bed.

My mental health is not that bad at the moment. But trying to write, to tread the treacherous journey upwards climbing the mountain of self, has been difficult. There's been a sandstorm of self-consciousness howling at every turn.

But I can still put one foot in front of the other. I can still slowly, stubbornly stumble on.

The storm will abate. It will cease. And until then there is only this. Do the things. Keep on going. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

I hope that whatever your things are you are able to find the strength to do them, and that you are able to carry on.