It comes up every so often that I just… Can’t Work. I’ll sit for hours or days on end and watch every single Mob Psycho or Steven Universe clip on YouTube and it’ll be entirely unproductive to anything that I want to do. I’ll do things like excitedly put 20 things in an online shopping cart and then spend three hours debating if I actually want these things or if I can even afford them. It’s on days like these where I hate myself the most. I feel utterly, entirely powerless to do anything that I want to do no matter what coping mechanism I try: reading the Bible, watching advice videos on YouTube, cleaning my room. On days like these, it doesn’t matter that I have an overdue deadline — my brain struggles to form a coherent thought, and then, paralyzed by indecision, I lay in bed the whole day doing absolutely nothing. It’s not like I have fun in order to avoid work — I would be much happier if I knew I was productive, I entrench addictions to give myself a barrier, a sort of twisted safety net to avoid work.
I wonder if it’s because I’ve equated my self value too closely to the amount of work that I can do, or that I just can’t do anything without someone to supervise my every move and encourage me at every tiny bend in the road.
Maybe it’s about waking up. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at my phone first thing in the morning. I’m trying not to, but it’s always been the easiest to just set my alarm on my phone and then go.
There’s a folder of apps on my phone called “inertia.” I envy the people who can take breaks without being afraid of slipping into endless languor. It’s like they have a switch for work and play that they can easily toggle between “on” and “off.” For me, it’s always felt like a
Perhaps…I shouldn’t have taken on any work this summer and just let myself have unadulterated rest. Being in the city, it’s hard to let myself do that. I don’t really have a sense of what day of the week it is, especially during the summer, so it’s a little harder to take the Sabbath like I did during the school year.
I was so scared to come to college.
It just feels like I’ll do something, and then after a while, I’ll decide that it’s not right for me or that it’s just lost its magic.
It’s been way harder than I thought to keep the one rule that I set for myself. I feel myself compulsively reaching for my phone to type in the URL to this website so I can frantically review what I wrote, to etch into my brain a sense of who I am and what I’m doing here and maybe dig up some scrap of motivation to finally just do the thing. But I’m not giving myself that excuse. Again, I’m trying my best not to wallow, because I know I’m going to get dragged down into the spiral of “I can’t” and “I don’t want to.” I’m trying not to make excuses for myself. But on days like today, the inability to do anything, the suspension of executive function, seems too hard, too cold, too stone-like to be anything but reality.