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itsnotthatdeepc · 7 days ago

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January 1st 2025: Castlebar to Ennis via Galway (bus)

Quarter-century of living is coming around the corner and despite what everyone says, I'm more acutely aware of how fractional time is.

Essentially, all going well, I'm a third of the way through of what statistical averages suggest I have in the bank of good health for my lifespan, so I finally have to get the boot under my arse and start looking after myself better. This is the point where I don't have the cushion of playing off youthful resilience while I play poker with my own physical and mental state.

So, even though I don't like to make lengthy lists of resolutions- habit-forming and habit-breaking are the bane of life for someone with executive dysfunction- I am going to at least set aside a few good sense ideas that I can bounce back to whenever I start feeling the carpet pulling underneath my feet.

Consistency: whatever I do this year, whether it be objectively constructive or destructive, I should at least try to maintain it at a similar level for the sake of stability. Naturally, I don't want this to be a way of encouraging harmful behaviours but I don't believe I'll ever truly break from the pattern of indulging them if I don't reach a stage where I don't demonise myself for falling into them. Patchwork skills profiles and falling into extremes of achievement or disappointment are intense enough to disrupt large swathes of my time. I don't want to spend next December looking back at gaps in my memory or stagnant weeks of barely surviving. Even if I reach that stage, I want to be able able keep making the incremental efforts to move from survival to actually living.

Active living, not passive: A skill I have only in recent years begun to appreciate is the intensity at which I can hyperfocus. Enough that I can dissociate entirely from my environment and solely take in information from whatever I put my focus in. Although that state isn't triggered with any great regularity, that sense of detachment and dissociation is something I've become a lot more conscious of in the last few months. I've somehow reduced myself to a background observer of my own life; allowing other external circumstances and other people's choices and decisions dictate my life because it conserves my mental energy. It has its uses, certainly; using that coping mechanism has definitely been a factor in reducing the frequency of my migraine episodes. But the downside is that by doing so, I've almost unlearned how to do things for myself, to bear responsibility for my life and how I utilise my time. Too many days have been left in a paralytic state of dormancy; no sense of progression or regression, which completely throws my temporal awareness off balance in the moments when it becomes necessary to attune myself to societal obligations.

Know the limits: 2024 was a year of stretching all the limits I had, whether they were deadlines, comfort levels, physical exertion or opportunities, to their maximum capacities. This isn't sustainable long-term. Instead, knowing what a hard limit is and internalising the consequences of hitting the wall is something I could badly do with working on. In another sense, it's also something I need to explore in other areas of my life; being able to decide what's a reasonable amount of leeway to give myself if I fall short of expectations or better judging when I have given too much of myself in a situation is something I have been improving at, but there's still a long way to go.

Be kind to myself: This is not the same as being nice to myself- that would mean letting myself chicken out of doing important stuff, which favours absolutely no one. I've spent so much of my life on this earth repressing aspects of myself, molding like a chameleon to fit the contexts and situations I find myself in. While on the surface, that allows for smoother interactions, the reality is that I have lost so much of my sense of self that I have a fragmentary collage of facets in place of a solid identity. I mold to suit expectations set by others, while chastising myself for not meeting them when I don't actually set them for myself. I say things that I think others would say, while not sharing my own opinions and feelings without a modicum of self-censorship. Writing has done a lot for releasing some aspects of myself that I keep locked away, but I could do well to have more good faith in people on a whole. Everyone wants to be understood as themselves on a level and I am coming to realise that you can only be encouraged by others being brave enough to share themselves truthfully with people.

Motivating life goals: since I was a child, I have always had an internal belief of “If I try hard enough, why shouldn't I be able to accomplish the goals that I set for myself.” There have been times where this innate determination has been sorely tested in various ways but ultimately, I have more or less been very successful. Barring my PhD- which I sincerely hope I can have completed next year- I have accomplished those internal, little-spoken of but dearly sought-after achievements that I expected to achieve within my lifetime. At the ripe old age of 24, I've made it further than my brain has ever considered planning for. Which says many things for my efficiency but is somewhat neglectful of how I look to live my life into later adulthood. I think it could be beneficial to settle on a new set of developmental milestones and career trajectories that I can follow. I have been very lucky in the opportunities and experiences that have come my way so far, but I can only avail of them if I can prepare myself for them. Now is a good time to think about the next decade of my life and what I can do to balance security with independence in a way that allows me to settle comfortably.

Relationships: As I get older, I have come to really value the people I choose to spend time with. I have some very important friendships and post-undergrad, I'm actually very proud of how I've been able to cultivate new and meaningful friendships. Having spent so much of my later childhood and adolescent years holding people at a distance and trying to avoid falling to surface-level situational friendships, be it due to geographical proximity or for the sake of not being alone, it feels immensely gratifying to know that having held out for nothing less than people whose principles I share and trusting that I will meet the people that I need to meet was worth it. Despite the social challenges and my own insecurities, I can indeed form meaningful relationships that have proven to be a lifeline in the darker moments of my life. I love them all more than I can probably express in any language and having finally understood the importance of interpersonal relationships, I hope to continue growing them and perhaps work on repairing those that are challenged or damaged. Life really is so much shorter than people credit it with and if we've made it to this moment in time, no matter where we are in life, then we owe it to ourselves to take advantage of it as best we can, no matter how you measure your best or how that measurement can change from one day to the next.

I don't know how often I'm going to write this blog. My travels are likely to be of a lesser distance and frequency, as my academic obligations start to stack up, but I have found that with transportation, generally a contradiction of travelling somewhere while conversely remaining stationary, I often find myself thinking over various situations; considering alternative interpretations of past events or positing variations of possible future ones. It can be a stimulating exercise and I think it could serve me- and perhaps somebody else- to be able to categorise and compile these thoughts somewhere from time to time. Even if it's just to remove the burden on my mind on occasion. After all, I don't do well with habits. But I do have a penchant for overthinking, so perhaps this can be a starting point for working on that consistency.

Slán go fóill agus athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh 🎆

C ~