Starting to Take Stock

Careening out of coming out of the closet and the concomitant mid-life crisis, I have yet to right myself entirely. There has been progress, to be sure, but I still operate far too much on a fuzzy-headed  getting by in the day-to-day, rather than action with a clear purpose with even a short-term plan in mind. And frankly, I'm not quite where I want to be professionally and socially so simply getting by is increasingly intolerable.

So I'm entering the phase of feeling stuck in the mud when I'm sitting back, splashing a little, entering  a sort of radical acceptance of the situation.  "So, you're stuck.  What's this like then?" I'm asking myself. I'm taking stock in other words.

"So this is the situation you've created for yourself, what would you like to do now?"

I'm not sure.  I've been trying to organize myself with limited results, both professionally and personally.  I increasingly despise living in digital environments for so much of my day (work and then home and then eventually in my sleep once we have the technology I guess).  Plus, I just have a hard time of feeling attached and motivated by organizing file folders on a desktop or in an app?  So I bought a bunch of paper notebooks because writing with a pen, even if it's just kind of simple statements about the structure I want the day to have, has been very helpful to me.  Still, I haven't been able to devise a system on paper that feels sufficient to me. I have a "triage" journal where I go to write out what I need to do to salvage the day after generally procrastinating for the first half of it. I  have a work "to-do" to help me get through the priority work tasks for the day.  And I have a general journal for "I need some paper to write or draw some shit out so I can think about it more clearly."

For now these suffice, but ideally I'd have several notebooks organizing my work projects (because there are many happening simultaneously usually) and several organizing and detailing my writing projects, of which there are many ideas but few actualities.  Why I can't make the leap from my current system to a more organized system I can almost visualize, I don't know.

I want to blame ADD, but I feel like anyone willing to confirm that diagnosis is just going to throw pills at me like I should fuck with my brain chemistry as an ongoing experiment with a shrug and a "yes, thank you doctor."

I am currently very stubborn about reasoning and feeling my way to the psycho-emotional knot that holds me captive and unraveling it.  In other words I want to work through the source of my depression and dissociation and solve it rather than medicating the symptoms simply to function properly in capitalism. But sometimes, I feel like I'm just thinking myself in circles instead of accomplishing anything productive.  Is this madness?  Sometimes it feels like it.

To this end, group therapy has been an amazingly positive choice.  I can't recommend it highly enough. But there is more to do, especially with regards to exercise and some sort of disciplined mental/spiritual practice, which is a subject for a future post.

I definitely look back at where I was in Reno and where I am now and see progress I am happy with. But a side-effect about allowing yourself to know who you really want to be, is noticing you aren't quite there yet.

Ask your doctor is knowing yourself is right for you.