Tag: emotions

097b – movement and work

Tasks and chores are finally in movement, and I’m quite glad. The last couple days have been much better compared to the weekend, perhaps I’m finally feeling more regulated and functional again post the previous Wednesday. 

Something I realised about writing recently is that I generally like writing in singular takes only. I just don’t feel called to a thing once some time has passed away from it. Whether it’s chapters or sections of a chapter, there has to be some amount of “completeness” wrt the thing. Stitching parts together feels strange and unfulfilling. 

Parents have been a bit in conflict and it’s weighing quite a bit on me despite my best efforts wrt distance (both physical and emotional). 

I feel a little bit dissociated from my body sometimes, or maybe just now, but I think I’ve been avoiding sitting with some of my feelings for sure. The major ones are probably grief, frustration, longing, anxiety, and also perhaps the weird angst that comes procrastination on unpleasant tasks. I do cry on an almost a daily basis, I spend time with writing and music and singing and dancing, and yet.. yet I feel like there’s something I’m running away from. Probably because nicotine is still quite prevalent, especially over the last 2-3 weeks. 

Excited to have this 100K words project almost wrapped up though. Pretty sure I can get this done by April. Of course, it wasn’t a deadline based thing ever, but I’d like to celebrate getting here anyway. And while it’s true that I’ll probably continue writing/blogging anyway, it’ll still feel nice to complete a specific milestone. Post that I’ll also be free to do my favorite thing ie writing about writing. I can think about goals and processes and meta stuff again, which I always enjoy of course. 

Pretty sleepy at the moment so I’d like to wrap this up in the next ten minutes. I also miss friends here, I feel like I haven’t seen people I used to regularly hang with for quite a while. Of course, I can make some plans etc but something’s been blocking me. 

Man, these are the toughest 500 words I’ve written in a while. How is it possible that I don’t have enough to talk/write about? I did do a lot of journaling today morning so maybe that’s a factor. Maybe I need to go out and collect some more data and stimulus to have stuff to write. 

Production classes are going well even though I do need to improve my setup so I can spend hours more sincerely than I’ve been doing so far. Honestly the dust here is such a pain. Not sure how to deal with that really. Which reminds me, I do have some house-maintenance chores to get done in the next few days as well. Ah well, that’s that. 

I feel like my capacity to “work” effectively has reduced a bit. However it’s also possible that I’m just not tracking things well. So I’m going to track my work/focus time a bit more over the next few days to just get a sense of that again. 

Alright folks, hope you’re having a pleasant April xx 

088a – feeling feelings

They say a sign of emotional intelligence is to hold feelings without letting them drive your decisions. But I hope it’s okay that I “decide to” write (and publish) even when I have big feelings because I (like to) think of myself as somewhat emotionally intelligent and I won’t let them tell me otherwise. Granted, I do spend a good amount of time with my feelings lately but I did want to spend a lot of my time on creative work and the one thing I know for sure is that I create best when it’s driven by feelings. Skill has always been a secondary pursuit to me and reception is also not been something I’ve been able to measure but I know that my happiness and joy in creation is highly dependent on following feelings. 

There is a lot I’ve been feeling today and I wrote it all down earlier tonight but I still don’t feel empty. 

There are things I want to say to people who may or may not want to hear them but I am fragile and I don’t know how to gauge well what other people want. What do I want? I want to bare my soul (or whatever) without being made to feel like that’s something I’m not supposed to do. 

Sure, I can make music and I can write poetry and I can make it all a little more “digestible” but what is it about things being as is that makes it “non digestible” for other people? I won’t know. Maybe I’m not supposed to know. 

My mother has become quite a close “friend” of mine over the last few months and I feel so lucky to have her in my life. I lay my head in her lap today and asked her how we as a race (ie humans) can get intimacy so wrong and she looked at me with sympathy which made me feel like she thinks it’s not necessarily a race problem but a me problem. And maybe it really is a me problem and I’m okay to take that feedback because I’ve been doing a lot of the work and I’ve been doing healthy things and maybe it’s okay that there’s still a lot of work to be done and I’m willing to accept that because the other explanation is that I’m severely unlucky and that just does not seem to be true, really, so.. I don’t know. 


I feel like the world always wants me to process things faster than I want to process them and despite repeatedly expressing that I don’t like being rushed people keep rushing me. They want me to move on faster, be happy faster, not grieve as much as I do, not be sad as much as I am, not talk about things as much as I do.. and yet, they don’t know how to set their own boundaries, is what jumps out to me, almost. I guess this means I would really respect people who are able to set their own healthy boundaries. 

I don’t know. Today’s a bit of a bouba day. Although I’m not displeased. Cheers xx 

062a – living as someone who’s infp, hsp but also has gad

#ifyouknowyouknow LOL (If these acronyms don’t make any sense that’s alright, they’re mostly just for myself)

I think I have a brain-voice and a body-voice, especially when it comes to writing. The more I can be in touch with the body-voice, the “better” my writing is (I think)— I don’t know what the exact quality is which makes it read better to me (I think there’s a better style, or flow)— but I know it’s better. 

But sometimes my brain-voice likes to vent too, and that’s fine but I wonder if I could differentiate what I’m feeling before I even start, so I can be a little more aware of how the write-up might come out. 

I think right now, it’s a mix. I meditated a bit before starting because I wanted to get in touch with my body-voice. 

I’ve been a bit sick for the last 2-3 days and it’s getting worse, which I’m quite upset about because it feels like I keep falling sick every month. 

Anyway, something on my mind lately is “high sensitivity”. I read about it a couple years ago (ie the “highly sensitive person” (HSP) trait) and although I related pretty strongly to it even then, it’s only over the last couple weeks I’ve been facing “too many feelings” as a problem, which led me back to this. Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve also recognised just how much of an effect loud sounds and crowds etc can have on me. Not just in terms of preferences, but really strong preferences, or almost needs. Additionally, because a lot of the symptoms of being an HSP overlap with my other “issue” ie my generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), I just attributed most of it to that. But I suppose HSP makes a lot of sense too since it’s not just heightened anxiety that feels like a lot lately, it’s a bunch of other feelings too (even the positive ones, actually). 

So, yeah, looking forward to reading more about how to cope with this, ie if there are things I can do which can help me focus on the strengths of being an HSP and work around the pitfalls/weaknesses. 

Recognising “too many feelings” as a problem is making me think about other little improvements I want to make as well. For example, I share a lot of art/work on socials but I don’t want to be continuously checking to see how it fares. It’s just too many feelings to navigate and I think holding off from checking for even 12-24 hours can help me avoid the whole thing altogether. Because I’m certain my attachment to the feedback will not be as strong a day after I share the thing. (At least on the internet). For example, the primary reason posting these posts is so easy is that I actually, genuinely don’t care too much if a post doesn’t get much engagement. (I’m happy when it does, but not too affected when it doesn’t). That is where I want to be with all pipelines. 

A post called “uninstalling copes” (or was it a book?) by @visakanv is coming to mind right now. I think along with art and creative work, uninstalling copes and emotional healing is also something I want to focus on for the coming phase of life. Ah right, it’s about addiction. Makes sense. 

Tl;dr: Sequence of events over the last couple months which can explain my mental/emotional state right now: 

  1. [May] quit job, move to India after 6 years of being outside (big change)
  2. [Aug] no job, move to my own place in delhi (big change, high anxiety) 
  3. [Oct] adaptation, settling in // tiny heartbreak/loss, quitting nicotine (lots of feelings) 
  4. [Oct] identifying as HSP, feeling called to creative work and (self) emotional healing 

Yeah, I think that probably summarises the last six months pretty well. Alright that’s it for now, I’ll write soon! 

Sources:
[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/highly-sensitive-persons-traits-that-create-more-stress-4126393 
[2] https://highlysensitiverefuge.com/

060a – making things vs sharing things

It’s all quite painful. But sometimes I genuinely think I’m meant to feel so much (especially the negative emotions) so that it can fuel my creative work. Which is also something that I think I’m meant to do. 

A lot of the creative results/outcomes I’m truly proud of have really come out from moments of deep suffering. I don’t think I can yet come up with melodies without feeling deep pain or deep negative emotions. I hope this changes though. I really want to work on making more original music (I don’t know why, yet) and I wish I can do that even without so much pain.  

Brain-chatter around “motivations for making art” have been at all a time high. 

Lately I feel really called to music and writing. 

Most of the time, I’m happy to “just be creating”. I’m happy to just be making things. Whether it’s a blog-post or a song cover or even doodles, surprisingly enough. However, I’m spending 20-30% of my active brain-power on the question around sharing the stuff that I make. 

The sharing aspect is not something I enjoy very much. 

With writing however, it’s low overhead, this blog is pretty easy to manage, and the more artsy write-ups sometimes even end up on Instagram, and overall it’s easy. 

With music though, the overheads are pretty high. Recording stuff just takes so long, and for some reason I don’t enjoy it very much. Add to that the engagement on my music account has been pretty low lately, so that then adds certain amount of negative feelings and you have to regularly keep recovering from it to continue to keep posting. 

Sometimes I think it’s okay if I don’t share the things I make right away as well. For instance, I wrote a bunch of poetry around three years ago which I shared with friends at the time, but I only started sharing it at open-mics and on socials a few months ago. And it felt.. okay. Almost right. Like it was finally time for it to be shared. And it’s also saying something that if you look at something you wrote three years ago and still felt like sharing it, that’s good signal for yourself too. 

I also think maybe I have certain icky feelings around the sharing aspect because parts of it overlap with the “how can I monetise my art” aspect and I’m just not ready to address that question yet. 

This helps for now. It’s almost 6 am, so I must attempt to sleep. 

057b – need a break from constant evaluation and thoughts (read: anxiety)

August and September have been hard. I think truly, the “adjustment” to India began only in August. Living by myself is the only way I can really compare different locations and so May-July didn’t really give me the signal I needed. And boy, living by myself here is definitely hard. Safety (and associated things) is the core problem. Weather is second. Everything else I can still cope with. Or tolerate at least, for the good things. 

Anxiety has been way too high. I think January-May was a relatively low anxiety period despite everything, because I’d “made the decision” to move, so I was essentially just enjoying life. May-July was okay as well. Lately I’ve been feeling really scattered, anxious, emotionally fragile, dependent, all sorts of things. I might need to consult my psychiatrist and get back on meds soon. Might help with the next few months. 

Even though I have gained some clarity with respect to the question “how do I like to spend my time”, action is still something that proves to be tough on a daily basis. 

I think I’m also tired of the “evaluative” thought-process that’s been constantly occurring in me over the last few months. With geography, with the things that I do, with relationships, everything. I really want to just be more present. Like sure, you have bad days and good days, or you have good things and bad things in most days, doesn’t always have to mean something. Yes, I’m doing some data collection but that’s not all I’m doing. Living is primary, capturing signal from living is secondary. And it will be subconscious, I don’t have to actively do it everyday. Reflection is important and I can keep regularly making space for it but I can’t keep reflecting while I’m experiencing. Might need to look a little more into the how of this. 

I’ve also been a little unwell but it’s been tough to be easy on myself, because I’ve been so easy on myself over the last few months. I feel like that’s not fair and I shouldn’t have to “make up” for enjoying life but there’s definitely two parts in me that have been fighting on this quite a bit. 

To summarise: 

[Ick] How to take a break from constant evaluation and reflection, while life is happening? Ie how to be more present and in the moment? 

[Ick] How to build more emotional resilience? 

[Task] Schedule a session with my psychiatrist, maybe get back on anxiety meds

[Yum] The clarity wrt my creative outlets still persists and I’ve started vocalising it more in front of people as well, so that’s nice.  

Alright that’s it from me. Intention for the week is to go easy on myself, hope y’all will do the same with yourselves! 

055b – quietening voices

I spend half of my time trying to quieten the voice in my head. My self-talk isn’t too negative (ie I have worked hard on this and at least that’s good), but there is still a lot of talking happening, I don’t think it’s very helpful. However, it’s a little tough to keep yourself engaged with something all the time. I wish doing nothing wasn’t so effortful. 

I was working on a painting today but it didn’t turn out very well, so that bummed me out for quite a bit. But then I was going through an old sketchbook (not super old, maybe from a few months ago) and I discovered a painting that I really liked. In theory I know that making a lot of “bad” art is the only way I’ll also be able to make some good art, and all that’s fine, but it’s still a bummer when you don’t like the end result. 

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to focus enough on a single form of creative expression for long enough that I can consider monetising it. This could just be the anxiety talking, or maybe I genuinely need some help with this. 

Feeling more and more settled in my new place with each passing day though, and that feels good. I’m hosting a housewarming thing over the weekend and definitely looking forward to it. 

I finally finished reading “Normal People” (having seen the show before made the read a little slow) but needless to say it was a great book. Sally Rooney’s definitely getting added to my favourite-authors list.

Having time to myself (ie time for emotions and art) has been great, but I do think I need to increase my chores/errands output a little bit too. Not very sure about how to go about doing this. Maybe I need to get more organised in some ways. 

When I consume great content (ie content that impacts me in a unique way), it’s always accompanied by a desire to be making great content, but I’m not able to follow-through on execution, not much. I wish the line between self-compassion and complacency was not as fine. 

Despite me having having moved out, the presence of my grandmother is just too strong. I feel bad for her mental state, but I also know I don’t have any solutions for her. She calls me once every 2-3 days and I try to talk to her but it’s just incredibly frustrating. I think knowing that she affects both my mom and dad so negatively makes me additionally unaccommodating of her. 

Anyway, despite all this, I think I feel sufficiently grounded on a day-to-day basis. I’m about to turn 28 soon! I did some yearly reflection the other day but I want to make some more time for it. Might share that next post. 

Good week ahead!

(Wrote this last night but forgot to hit publish, so here I go)

053a – my relationship with envy

So, something (an emotion) I’ve struggled with for a while now is envy. Obviously, the comparison reflex hits most of us sometime during school, and that’s when I developed it as well. Part of it is of course societal conditioning, but part of it might be biological too, I’m guessing. Biology does make us compete, since we’re limited people vying for limited resources. Or at least, we were. Resources and attention are not limited in the same way they were earlier. (They are limited in many ways, but I think that’s a separate discussion.) 

So anyway, I know theoretically, I don’t need to be envious of my friends who’re in great relationships, because I’m not competing for the attention of the people they’re dating. Or I don’t need to be envious of someone who has their life sorted, because that is most likely not affecting my capacity to sort my own life.  

And yet, the envy does come up. I think part of it is just that it’s a reminder of the parts of my life I’m not necessarily satisfied with. Like the two things I most commonly feel envy around are

1. Being single and
2. People having geographic clarity

Another that sometimes comes up is related to my avoidance behaviours (wrt my anxiety), so if I see someone having a lot of fun and living their “best” life in terms of doing whatever they seemingly want, I do experience some envy there as well. 

So, yes, the envy exists even when I know it doesn’t need to. Now, what I have gotten better at, is letting it exist. I don’t feel bad about it, I don’t try to resist it, I don’t shame myself for it, etc. So, I think I have become more accepting of it over the last couple years. Which.. I’m pretty happy with. At least I don’t feel a ton of turmoil about the envy. But of course, that’s just step 1. There’s a step 2 and step 3 here. 

Step 2: would be, I think, to act in the best way possible once the envy has passed. For example currently I’ve been unable to call and catchup with a friend who told me she’s getting married because I’m just worried I’ll feel things I’m not ready to feel. Like, of course I’m very happy for her, it’s just that the envy is blocking me a little bit from accessing the happiness and all the other “good” emotions. But now that I’ve addressed this, I think I can do it. 

Step 3: of course, would be, to tame the comparison reflex. To tell myself the comparison is unnecessary whenever I find myself doing it. Eventually, I hope the envy will reduce as well. 

To summarise, envy is natural, and is completely valid from time-to-time. Mostly, it’s just signalling something in my life I’m not happy with, even though it may not directly be related to this other person’s news. I’ve gotten decent at experiencing envy, I don’t feel second-layer emotions about it. But what I want is for the envy to not block my access to the other more “positive” emotions. And lastly, I want to cut down on the (involuntary) comparison thought-pattern, so that I can reduce the envy at the root. 

051b – late twenties are tough

Dating is hard. One minute you’re deep into the fantasy of falling in love with a new person you might have met, and the next minute you’re grieving the fact that they left you on “Seen” (albeit for a day). I’ve worked a lot on myself since my first dating-apps-sourced heartbreak of 2020, but there is only so much work you can do with the past and the present. There are scenarios that come up every time you meet a new person that bring up so much new stuff for you, and no amount of self-work, therapy, healing, non-fiction / self-help books can really prepare you for the real thing. I think. I shudder to thing how much I might have been affected by said scenarios if I was still the same person I’d been in 2020. 

Dating is realising that the knowledge of your attachment styles, communication preferences, following @therapyjeff etc etc doesn’t actually prevent you from feeling shitty when things don’t go as expected. Partly because the people you meet may not have engaged in all of this. But also partly because at the end of day, lived experience will trump everything. Bottom line is, while you can look at your feelings with more awareness (and knowledge), there is no way to avoid them altogether. Pain and suffering is the price we pay for living. 

Last couple of days have been tough. House-hunting was paused for a bit because I couldn’t really find good options, but overall I’ve been unable to focus on other things until this piece is figured. I think that’s the tough part for me, parallelisation. It does take around a month in most places to find a place, so I’m trying to just remind myself that, but overall optimism has been hard to find when it comes to this. I’m also conflicted about the area/neighbourhoods I’m looking in and whether I should compromise a little bit on that (since I’m unable to find good places in my most preferred areas). I don’t know. 

I found a music open-mic event that’s happening somewhat nearby to my current house, thinking of going and participating in that. I was practicing singing today and realised that it does recharge me, even though I often forget that when I’m not actively engaging in it. So maybe it’ll be nice to engage in this goal of mine and get that done with. I also enquired about drums classes nearby and going for an intro session today. Excited about that though! Been meaning to try this out forever so if I can engage with this, I might feel good. 

I was supposed to have therapy this Monday which got canceled which I think is the primary cause of why I’ve been feeling so low last few days. I mean, not the root cause itself but something which could have alleviated everything. 

In summary, dating, house-hunting, physical tiredness, a canceled therapy session, potential pms – these are the things that have got me down. Let’s see what shape the week ends up taking. Onward! 

045b – gratitude + journeys

I am absolutely in love with the world today. I don’t know if it’s because my dad did a really cool ally thing* today morning or because a cute girl called me cute on Bumble or because I took the metro to go somewhere after ages of being fed up about traffic and the (perceived) lack of public transport in Delhi** or because I spotted (and bought) a super cool t-shirt at Uniqlo which gave me major gender euphoria (and general euphoria) and made me feel like I have great taste or because I had a nice time hanging out with this really close friend of mine or because… just. It’s probably all the things, not just one of them. 

Regardless, it’s a happy day. 

Overall, more good days than bad days over the last month. And that’s really great.

Having time for your emotions and ideas is really great. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back to the constrained ways of living. I mean, I still practice “discipline” a little bit, I haven’t let everything run amok. But I don’t think I can do the 9-5 routine thing anytime soon. 

I like the idea of having “certain things” that you do do everyday. Like I like playing online Catan and having cold coffee for breakfast each morning (or noon, when I wake up). I like watching a little bit of good TV with some good food sometime in the day. I like reading, I like doing at least one creative thing (painting, singing, writing). And lastly, I like some physical exercise (workout at home or preferably a walk outside). I do like having these set things that I do do, almost daily. But I don’t like having “fixed” times around them. Or I don’t want a compulsion around any of this. 

I love the journey. Some (very few) of my thoughts (very tiny thoughts) lately have been in colours. And images. I really like that. It’s like learning a new language. And then to truly learn a skill would be to directly be able to think in this different language as well. Because, sure, translations are important. But the real magic I think will happen when your consciousness directly receives these thoughts and feelings (from inside you) in this different language. (Think words, melodies, colours, movements, sounds as the “different languages”.)

Anyway, I’m not high. Point is, the universe is great, life is precious, routinely activities are nice, and learning a skill is like learning a language, and if you’re lucky, you get to enjoy the journey. 

*cool ally thing: he forwarded me dates of a pride march that his company is doing in various cities 

**public transport in Delhi is actually pretty decent, compared to some other cities in India. But of course, my latest point of comparison is the Netherlands, which is hard to beat, so I hope I can be excused. 

043a – body dysmorphia ft. other feelings

I’m tired. Tired of living in my head. And yet, coming back to the present is so tedious. I don’t know why though. I don’t know. Maybe there’s feelings I’m trying to avoid. Who am I kidding, of course there’s feelings I’m trying to avoid. Feelings like.. like I’ve “wasted” my weekend. Like I actually don’t even know what I want to spend my time on. Like the things I want to spend my time on aren’t appealing anyway. Like it’s terribly hard, living in my body, because I constantly feel shitty. I’m sad about how anxious it makes me to step outside on a day I’m not feeling good about myself. My body dysmorphia is so strong. My avoidance behaviours make me feel so disconnected from the world sometimes. 

Okay, 2 minutes of meditation just helped me just now. I also remembered the first time I’d successfully been able to use meditation to feel okay. It was after after my first big/ever breakup. And I vividly remember the pain I was feeling at the time, and this insane urge to “just want to see her” once. I don’t know how I knew what meditation really was (I mean, it wasn’t as big and common a word back then), but I somehow did. And I looked it up and actually went out of my house to just try out some walking meditation. And man, it really was something. I guess awareness can be magical. The awareness that lets me observe myself feeling the shitty feelings. 

Yesterday was the first time I was actually overwhelmed by a positive emotion. I was feeling a ton of excitement about an idea that came to me and I really just couldn’t hold it or process it. I think it was combined with anxiety too, perhaps, which is why it wasn’t purely pleasurable. But I knew it was like 70% excitement and 30% something else. I don’t know. Eventually, I was able to calm down. 

I only have two weeks until I move and that’s kind of not sinking in either. I seem to have a lot of time but nothing to actually want to fill it with. Read a little bit about body dysmorphia on reddit and about how some people struggle with the same shit I do and I feel a little better now. 

There’s a lot of things I do to simply “avoid regrets”. I know that’s okay but I do wonder what life would be like I were able to do things because I “want to” do them. Basically, can pure “regret minimisation” be a good strategy? Maybe not, right? I don’t know, this needs more introspection. 

I really wanna move soon so I can start dating again. It’s been incredibly boring and hopeless over the last 1-2 months since I haven’t been able to do that. 

I think note to self: The third day is always a stretch. I did step out of the house for groceries yesterday but it still wasn’t enough. I think three straight days of “no plans as such” just does not work for me. Gotta stop at two, at max.