Day 288: Tenacity

Woah pickle. Let’s just pause a second. It’s 2am and I’m just home from work, run down, grumpy, feeling broken. But let’s just pause. This is my two-hundred-and-eighty-eighth day consecutively posting on this blog. What’s that in months? 288, divide by 12, times by 31, minus a leap year, carry the BODMAS...

It’s quite a few months.

I keep catching myself feeling worthless because the quality of the posts isn’t anywhere near where I want them to be. Occasionally I write something that I’m proud of, and it feels great, but mostly it’s just some random words scraped off the inside of my brain at 2am, some squidgy residue, gimpy and festering, scraped off and slung online, not sounding writerly, not saying anything vital, not being honest or poetic or entertaining, just doing it, doing something, doing anything.

But even that, if I pause, if I judge it the way I’d judge it if a friend was doing it, someone I cared about… Even that is incredible.

It’s setting down a habit. Ingraining the routine. It’s personifying diligence and perseverance, tenacity. These are not traits commonly associated with me. Not for so many years lost in the wilderness, assuaging pain with drink or drugs, feeling overwhelmed, procrastinating, giving up.

It was that learned helplessness stuff of depression that I wrote about before. That stuff is so hard to come back from. It infects everything.

And this is not that. For 288 days I have quietly and steadily fought against that, one little post at a time. I have come here and I have said to that inner critic “I am doing this”, over and over again.

Even if every single post was shit - and they’re not, not nearly - but even if they were it would still be such an achievement, if I was able to see it that way. And I can see it that way. I just have to turn away from the ways the old me would have viewed the situation, the negatives he would have picked out, like finding the worms in a field of roses - I just have to turn away from that and turn towards another way of thinking, another way of being. There are roses everywhere, and there are always going to be worms, too. It’s just changing your perception to not get caught up focusing on the worms, honing in on them, staring at them until you can’t see anything else. Because the roses really are everywhere. And if you stop to look, you will notice them more and more.

OK. Good. That’s all very rambling, but good. Going sleep now. Bubyeeee.

……

Music: Send Me a Postcard by Shocking Blue. Oh yeaaaah. Late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock. I mean, just look at that album cover. If you had to invent the album cover for a late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock outfit, you'd come up with exactly that. I love it. It's Jefferson Airplane but even more so. Awesome.