Well, the long and short of it all is I don’t have a clue. I am currently trying to figure it out, but often life feels like it a little bit too much. Long Covid means I still, years later, struggle with fatigue amongst other things. Working full-time is hard and what is even worse is that people tend to not understand that I am still sick from Covid. Often, I feel ashamed of myself.
They want to go do something in the evening and I feel horrible when trying to explain that I can’t go because I am simply too tired. It’s like I am not just fighting to get better every day, I am also supposed to pretend I am already better – I can’t complain if I am tired, that’s for sure, because if I do, I have explain that Covid is still a thing that affects my life. People don’t get it and I end up feeling embarrassed and ashamed of my own weaknesses.
I don’t want to explain myself every single day. Why can people not remember? I have been sick for two years; one should think that people would remember by now.
I am not as upset as I might sound, but I am tired all the god damn time. Working full-time is honestly too much for me, but I don’t have a choice. I have student loans to pay, food and rent and all the things we all have every month. My salary is not much, but it’s enough. I can’t go on holiday or anything wild like that, but I get by.
Also, I am aware that world is not against anyone, even though it really can feel like it. What really is against us is our own mind. The thoughts we have do far more to keep us down and feeling horrible than anything else could. Which is the reason it feels like the world is against us; our mind interprets the world – the world doesn’t actually make sense at all; we make sense of everything. So, if our mind is against, it’s like the whole world is.
Suppose we could argue with our mind, or the world, but really, what use is that? I am also tired of being angry with myself. Anger is not a feeling I am comfortable with, nor one I feel often, but I do periodically get angry at myself for being tired, weak and sick. Then I get angry at myself for being at myself and on it goes – an endless loop of self-blame and frustration.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about thinking. I wish I could think less, sometimes. Then again, often problems seem to stem from me not thinking enough.
My issue today is, how do we stay motivated? Shit happens and we deal with it, then shit happens and we deal with that. How long is that supposed to go on? When do we get a break? It could just be life, and in that case, how do we deal with that?
I have the off today, I was at a funeral yesterday and feel entirely drained from social interactions and so I took today off so that I could recuperate a bit before going back to work. You know what I spent today doing? Feeling stressed about all the things I should do now that I have the time, my mind spinning like crazy. I have all these silly thoughts, when I really took the day off to relax and recuperate after a tough day yesterday.
That was not the plan. So, I am going to make a new plan as the old one clearly didn’t work. I am going to relax today. I will play games, bake a chocolate cake and eat a delicious lunch. Every time I start blaming myself I will pretend it is not me thinking it. I will ignore and try and simply feel good today.
Now, my mind is practically laughing at me because this is not going to be easy. I can’t help but feel like, if I can accept the negative thoughts I have and ignore, maintaining a sense of motivation is going to be lot easier. Could be, of course, but I won’t know until I try.
I have a lot of challenges in my life right now, too many and too complicated for me to know how to deal with just a fraction of all of it. Perhaps, if I clear my mind a bit, it’ll be easier to see solutions instead of blame and frustration. Of course, I might find a way to deal with the challenges I face, perhaps I will even lose the chance to continue this blog because I am struggle to pay even just the small bills that are required of me to do so or perhaps I’ll lose my job, but let’s be honest here. No matter what happens, not having a voice in my head that always blames me and makes me feel bad about everything that happens would definitely be a wonderful change.
I thought I had worked with this, though. I thought I understood that my thoughts are merely that – thoughts – and not all that I am. I used to feel better than this, I think.
It could be a process. Maybe it’s not deal with your thoughts once and then you’ll be fine. Maybe it’s a skill, like learning to play guitar or cooking or sewing. If you forget to practice regularly, you forget how to do it properly and you struggle a bit to get back into it. Even if I have forgotten, then I hope I’ll be able to pick it up again faster. Something once learned is never truly lost, is it?
Every day I worry about losing what I have learned, because I am afraid of wasting all the hard work I already put into it. I feel like, if I forget, then all that time before was wasted.
It wasn’t, I know, because I am who I am because of how I spent my time, right? So, yeah, I understand that learning something, even if we forget, is never really wasted. It made me who I am and I am happy to be where I am, even if I still want to grow and change. If I hadn’t been who I am now, maybe I would have been stuck in old patterns and not even realise that I wanted to be different.
Cliché as it might be, maybe what ought to motivate us is the joy of learning, not the goal of having learned something. That way, we can continue to enjoy even learning the same thing many times. We all forget, right? Even if we study every day all the time, we still forget. We’re human and all humans forget some things sometimes, right? It’s a part of life.
