What Eug Thinks

A while back my therapist gave me a sheet of “77 Ideas for Self-Nurturing Activities”. I thought I’d put it up here–mostly without comment–for reference.

1. Listen to my favorite music
2. Enjoy a long, warm bubble bath
3. Go for a walk
4. Share a hug with a loved one
5. Relax outside
6. Exercise (of my choice)
7. Spiritual prayer
8. Attend a caring support group
9. Practice diaphragmatic breathing
10. Do stretching exercises
11. Reflect on my positive qualities: “I am…”
12. Watch the sunrise/sunset
13. Laugh
14. Concentrate on a relaxing scene
15. Create a collage representing “The real me”
16. Receive a message (Is this a typo of “massage”?)
17. Reflect on: “I appreciate…”
18. Write my thoughts and feelings in a personal journal
19. Attend a favorite athletic event
20. Do something adventurous
21. Read a special book or magazine
22. Sing/hum/whistle a happy tune
23. Swing/slide/teeter totter
24. Play a musical instrument
25. Spiritual meditation
26. Work with plants (gardening)
27. Learn a new skill
28. See a special play, movie or concert
29. Work out with weights/equipment
30. Ride a bike or motorcycle
31. Make myself a nutritious meal
32. Draw/paint a picture
33. Swim/float/wade/relax in a pool or the beach
34. Do aerobics/dance
35. Visit a special place I enjoy
36. Smile/Say: “I love myself”
37. Take time to smell the roses (and other flowers I enjoy)
38. Imagine myself achieving my goals and dreams
39. Go horseback riding
40. Reflect on: “My most enjoyable…”
41. Enjoy a relaxing nap
42. Visit a museum/art gallery
43. Practice yoga
44. Relax in a whirlpool/sauna
45. Enjoy a cool refreshing glass of water or fruit juice
46. Enjoy the beauty of nature
47. Count my blessings: “I am thankful for…”
48. Play as I did as a child
49. Star gaze
50. Window shop
51. Daydream
52. Tell myself the loving words I want to hear from others
53. Attend a special workshop
54. Go sailing/paddleboating
55. Reward myself with a special gift I can afford
56. Take myself on a vacation
57. Create with clay/pottery
58. Practice positive affirmations
59. Pet an animal
60. Watch my favorite TV show
61. Reflect on my successes: “I can…”
62. Write a poem expressing my feelings
63. Make a bouquet of flowers
64. RELAX: watch the clouds
65. Make myself something nice
66. Visit a park/woods/forest
67. Read positive motivational literature
68. Reflect on: “What I value most in life”
69. Phone a special friend
70. Go to a picnic in a beautiful setting
71. Enjoy a gourmet cup of herbal tea/decaf coffee
72. Participate in a favorite sport/game/recreation
73. Practice a relaxation exercise or listen to a relaxation tape
74. Practice the art of forgiveness
75. Treat myself to a nutritious meal at a favorite restaurant/cafe
76. Participate in a hobby
77. Create my own unique list of self-nurturing activities

I love Lego, and hopefully if you’re reading this you love Lego too. I came across this forum post and wanted to share it, not really because of its subject matter as written but rather because it gives links to a bunch of good Lego resources. I already used one of the sites linked in the post to find the brick list for a couple of mini sets and to purchase those sets of bricks from a 3rd party seller. Some of you will probably get some use out of it too.

http://www.fbtb.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=152

I feel like everything is disorganized in my life. This is actually and literally true for a lot of things, but I feel this way even about things for which it is completely untrue. I can’t really deal with disorganization–well, to be more specific I can’t function with disorganization. I do have one way to deal with it and that way is to avoid the thing that is disorganized, which leads to dysfunction. I’m sure this is a GAD/ADD thing: I hate dealing with something that is disorganized, and I need for it to be utterly perfectly organized before I can work with it, but the thought of putting in the organization effort is daunting and exhausting, so I instead avoid it completely. It’s just a specific manifestation of the counterproductive perfectionism that hounds me. This blog is a perfect example; I think of things I want to write posts about, but there are a hundred reasons why the post wouldn’t be perfect. The topic might be too mundane, I might not know enough about it or be wrong about it, or I might even just have other posts I wanted to write that I haven’t yet, and so a new post would throw everything out of order.

More than anything else I think I need to learn to just wade right in. I’ve known for a long time that this was a problem of mine, but I’m only recently realizing just how damaging it is. And now that I’m seeing it more clearly in myself, I’m also seeing it in other people and despising it.

Just do it, and worry about the details later!

Intolerance and superstition has always been the domain of the more stupid amongst the common folk and, I conjecture, will never be uprooted, for they are as eternal as stupidity itself. There, where mountains tower today, one day there will be seas; there where today seas surge, will one day be deserts. But stupidity will remain stupidity.

–styled Nicodemus de Boot, Meditations on life, Happiness and Prosperity, from Andrzej Sapkowski, Blood of Elves

Axiom One: People are stupid.

–ancient Arctic proverb

Yes, that means everybody, including me. You see, it’s an axiom, which means that–what? No, dammit, there is no Axiom Two. What? No, there’s no sub-axiom! Axiom One works because of its simplicity and universal… *sigh* never mind.

–ancient Arctic proverb

Let’s not talk about 2011. Not much, at least, maybe just enough to justify why we might want to forget it. It was a year of deaths and diseases, of trying to move forward in life and—largely—failing. This wasn’t universally true, since there were high points: weddings, new friends, realizations about others and self… even in the bad years, life marches on and wisdom accumulates, even if neither moves at a regular or predictable pace. But on the whole, this was a year best left behind.

So what, then, for 2012? Resolutions? Let’s see: my one resolution for 2012 is to not rely on resolution.

Since I’ve started therapy, I’ve discovered enough flaws (and I’ll get to my usage of that word soon enough) in my character that I should probably work on. The problem is that one of them is shying away from commitment. Well, okay, no; it isn’t so much shying away from commitment as being too married to commitment, while simultaneously being terrified of it. When I make a resolution or commitment I tend to switch into all-or-nothing mode. I can’t accept anything less than optimized perfection, and if anything less seems likely, I prefer not trying at all. That’s the reason why one missed gym session leads to months (sometimes years) of dormancy, or why a late start in a morning turns into a wasted day, which turns into an empty week, or why one mistake on a project makes me want to burn it all to the ground.

It’s all well and good to try and tell myself that it’s okay to make mistakes, but I do already know that. Obviously it’s okay to make mistakes, since I’ve made plenty and am still alive. The issue, instead of any potential grotesque consequences of mistakes, is the value judgment that my inner critic assigns to them. A mistake is never simply an error, it’s an inadequacy, a flaw.

Which reminds me: I used the word “flaw” earlier because it is flaws that I’ve found in myself. There’s no real way to accurately sugarcoat it. But what I (and I’m sure many others) do is to take that word and all of its connoted value judgments and internalize them automatically.

I was scanning through a book at the Aikido dojo one night: Zen Driving. There was a phrase used in it, something to the effect of “observe without judgment”. This phrase stuck with me over the next few months. I’m pretty far from a defensive driver, and it works for me in terms of results. I cut through traffic pretty well without getting into or causing any accidents. Along the way, however, I get really irritated with other people. Passengers in my car are often treated to “conversations” between me and the other drivers on the road, ranging from brief mutters to (on occasion) one-sided yelling matches. It’s probably no surprise that this does not make Alice happy to be my passenger.

When she’d talk to me about it, though, I’d get defensive: yeah, I didn’t need to get so mad at other anonymous drivers, but come on! Look at the stupid things they were doing! Look how they were getting in my way! I thought I couldn’t let go of my righteous anger without also ceding my correctness.

One of the tenets of Zen, especially as it’s understood by laymen (including myself), is to let go of things; in effect, to avoid value judgments and just be. However, the misunderstanding is that “right” and “wrong” are value judgments—and thus to be avoided—when in reality they’re states of being. Zen Driving was telling me what my ego needed to hear, that letting go of the value judgment and the attached emotions didn’t necessitate letting go of the truth of the situation and the attached actions. If somebody cuts me off to go half the speed limit in front of me, I can change lanes and floor my way past without getting angry about it. The “good” and “bad” of the situation are not for me to judge, and really the “right” or “wrong”—while entirely in the realm of logic—are moot. All that matters is that the situation is as it is, and I should change (or not change) my actions accordingly and continue on my way.

So these characteristics I’ve discovered in myself—the avoidance behavior, the distractability, the catastrophizing, and many others—are flaws, because “flaw” is just a state of being. A characteristic can be a “flaw” without being “good” or “bad” in reflection on me; contrary to what my inner critic thinks, I and others can have flaws without reducing our value as people. The flaw is, however, part of the reality of the situation, and I should try to change my actions to compensate. A missed gym session doesn’t make me a failure as a human being, it just means I should try harder to get myself to the gym next time. Making a wrong play in a game doesn’t mean that I should scrap it all and start over, it just means I should learn from what happened and continue trying to make the best of the changed situation. A mistake isn’t a showstopper, isn’t a reason to give up, it’s just a new facet of reality to adjust to.

This is easier said than done, of course, and resolutions and lofty goals don’t exactly help in promoting the malleable nature of fallacy. Resolutions are made to be all-or-nothing. Lose fifty pounds or bust! Read ninety books this year! Make seven million dollars! The focus is constantly on the endpoint, not the progress made leading towards it.

So my resolution this year is to, while I’m trying new things and starting new projects and learning new skills and trying to make myself better in a variety of ways, not focus on the endpoints. It’s to let myself make mistakes, and to not treat those mistakes as fatal, as reasons to quit and see what happens next week, or next year, but to try my best to adapt to their effects right then, and continue onward. It’s to let go of the value judgments I apply to myself, and to instead concentrate on my state of being. So no, no resolutions… just Zen.

There are a lot of things I’m lacking in life. I’m talking about intangibles here: human interaction, productivity, mastery, fulfillment, those kinds of things. My chains of action are broken for various reasons, and when they break I often find myself thinking about exactly what it is I need in that situation, and how to go about getting it.

The thing is that I do know (in most of these cases) what I need and how to get it. But trying to get moving along the chain of action just doesn’t work. My brain fuzzes out and I feel… well, I feel a lot of things. And this post isn’t so much about disorders I may or may not have and how they’re messing with me as it is about how I feel.

I feel like shit.

One of the things I’ve identified that I need is social interaction, and the companionship and intimacy that comes with that. And it’s pretty obvious how I should go about getting it: meet people, talk to people, do things with people, get to know people. Easy, right? And I’m not even particularly shy or nervous about any of that; I’m confident (or at least I can pretend to myself and others that I’m confident) and shameless, and when I’m in the moment everything is great. However, getting to the moment is the problem. Getting up the motivation to spend the effort going out and doing things with people is really hard. Most of the time Inner Critic is screaming about how traffic and parking will be annoying and time-consuming, how food and drink will be expensive and how I shouldn’t spend that money, how terrible it will be to be away from my home and my things, how there will be people out there who I don’t trust, etc. And all that, of course, is all assuming I was able to get myself to make those plans with other people in the first place. Goddamned Inner Critic.

Even worse than all that, though, is that I can barely get myself to talk to people in the first place. Tonight I was lonely, what with Alice being in France, myself having had an unproductively bad mental day, and some other crap I won’t get into here. That scenario isn’t particularly out of the ordinary. Sometimes even when Alice is here in the room with me I’ll still feel lonely. It reminds me of the lines from Robert Haas’s poem “The Privilege of Being”: “…the woman says to the man,/I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized/that you could not, as much as I love you,/dear heart, cure my loneliness,/wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him/that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.”

Anyway, here’s what tends to happen when I feel lonely like that: I throw some IMs or text messages or phone calls at my close (read: “safe”) friends, but they aren’t responsive because they’re busy with their own lives (which is something I’m working really, REALLY hard to stop BLAMING them for; that’s one of my thought distortions that actively and unfairly hurts other people). I bounce back and forth–half-heartedly but hungrily–between social networking sites and forums between feeble attempts to do something meaningful on my own. I consider participating–writing some replies in threads that interest me, maybe asking some questions, maybe even making a thread about something–but almost invariably back down with thoughts of how much mental effort it would take to commit myself and engage and deal with potential negativity and etc. Finally, I look at my instant messenger contact list, thinking that I’ll IM someone and talk for a while, but in pretty much every instance Inner Critic will come up with a reason why I shouldn’t. Some of these reasons have to do with how I think the other person perceives me, and are usually untrue. Other reasons have to do with ways that I might find the interaction stressful, because of supposed characteristics of the other person, and those are almost always untrue. So this person thinks that I’m uncool and wouldn’t want to talk to me, that person might be too gregarious and thus annoying to talk to, and this other person has been bothered by me quite enough and should be left alone.

THOUGHT DISTORTIONS (usually).

If I’m unresponsive to you, it almost certainly has nothing to do with my having any (real) negative opinion of you. If I don’t answer your messages or return your emails or schedule lunches with you, it’s because this asshole in my head is holding me back, whether directly (via the methods above) or indirectly (via depressive lack of motivation or via anxiety-driven avoidance behavior). The truth is that I want to talk, I want to hang out, I want to get to know you and let you know me. I’m not saying do the work and compensate for my crap, I’m just saying please don’t think I’m intending to be a jerk, and please don’t give up.

Yeah, I’m talking to you.

(Lots of people say things like “I’m talking to you” or “all of you are so wonderful” or other similar generalizations in touchy-feely posts, and there’s always the people (like me) who think, “I’m sure that doesn’t include me.” I considered putting a huge list of names here to make the point that yes, I actually DO mean YOU, but on further examination that idea seemed kind of silly. Suffice it to say that I can only think of MAYBE two or three people in the world who I would not want to have an earnest conversation with, so unless you know of some giant reason for me to hate you, it’s safe to say you’re included. No, a spat over Facebook comments (to give one particular example) is not a giant reason, at least not on my end.)

Anyway, so yeah, there’s that.