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I fell off the wagon the past couple of days. Struggling emotionally to motivate myself. Feeling sort of bogged down by work and the vigilance it requires and had a killer headache last night. Anyway, here are some attempts at catching up on this list.

8. When I’m in pain — physical or emotional — the kindest thing I can do for myself is…

My first instinct is to throw myself into something, be it sleep or some activity or place where I have to stop myself from breaking down. But all that's doing is avoiding the consequences of pain. At this point, it would probably be just to let myself cry.

9. Make a list of the people in your life who genuinely support you, and who you can genuinely trust. (Then make time to hang out with them.)

1. My parents, especially my dad. (My mom just usually lacks the spoons for it and has her own untreated issues.)

And they're pretty much the only people I can make time to hang out with. Everyone else is thousands of miles away.

2. My close friends online are the other others I have, and I make an effort to spend time with them but feel like my ability to be engaging to them is shrinking.

10. What does unconditional love look like for you?

I think unconditional love is when you choose to honor your commitment to loving someone even when you don't like their actions. It is risking a person's ire in the moment for their long-term benefit. It is being selfless when it is genuinely helpful but also standing up for yourself when a person you love tries to demand or abdicate things that aren't helpful to your relationship or to them as a person.

From this list.

I couldn’t imagine living without…

... air conditioning.

There was a time when this list would have included the internet too. While I very much don't want to live without the internet, though, I guess I have reached a point in time when I don't necessarily feel like the notion of an alternate reality where it was irrelevant would be the worst alternate reality. I care about the internet more for its utility in allowing me to meet some of the people I know than as an abstraction now, and I think that's at least slightly healthier.

Air conditioning is one of those things that I just wouldn't want to do without, though. When I get overheated I am miserable to a point of non-functioning. It makes it difficult to breathe and I often get piercing headaches. I could even manage without heat during the cold months much better than I could with no air conditioning at all. I've been in New England in the summer a couple of times, and people are crazy when they try to live with no means of cooling, not even a good window unit. I don't care how infrequently you need it. Why would you do that if you can afford a place to live??? I don't get it, man.

Oh, and also indoor plumbing. I'm sure that there are worse things to live without, but yeah. Showers are lovely. If I had to live without indoor plumbing, I would at the very least hope toilet paper existed... Not to TMI anyone but y'know. I really like survival stories, but that's one of the fridge horror things for me.

From this list.

“Write about a moment experienced through your body. Making love, making breakfast, going to a party, having a fight, an experience you’ve had or you imagine for your character. Leave out thought and emotion, and let all information be conveyed through the body and senses.” (A prompt from Barbara Abercrombie’s creative book Kicking In The Wall: A Year of Writing Exercises, Prompts and Quotes To Help You Break Through Your Blocks And Reach Your Writing Goals.)

I'm breathing in cold air, walking toward the door. I stop to look up at the sky. There is less light pollution here than back home. I lift my head until I feel the muscles in my neck stretch taut. I look at the stars. There is a streetlight to my back. Looking toward it, I see no stars. Looking over the roof of the house, I can see Orion on his side.

My friend who wants to become a therapist recently suggested that I try to commit to a month of something called Future Self Journaling. I've had the tab open for a few weeks, but the more I read over it, the more insincere I feel I would be at trying to do that specific line of prompting at this point in time. So I decided to poke around and see if I could find some psychology-based journal prompts to encourage self-awareness. I found this list, and while I find some of them kind of hokey and tiresome, I guess I am gonna see what I can do with them this month.

My favorite way to spend the day is…

My favorite days have, if I'm honest, always been those days when because of being a substitute teacher or due to inclement weather or something I get up, go to work in the morning, but suddenly find myself with some extra free time in the afternoon. Even though I don't think of myself as a morning person at all, since I stopped being a teenager and online communication stopped being so entirely anchored to a computer in a static location (since a lot of my meaningful relationships are long distance and primarily online), I find myself at odds with my tendency to stay up really late for... no apparent reason.

The reason I enjoy those days is that I am up, energized enough by activity to maybe not immediately go back to bed, but actually have the opportunity to invest my mental energy into something I want to do purely because I like it rather than out of a sense of responsibility or necessity. This can happen with two-hour delays in the mornings, too, but is less likely because I covet sleep too much particularly early in the morning for that to be much of any benefit.

I like to spend my days more equally divided between responsibility and leisure. When I have these weeks where I have nothing to do, I screw up my sleep cycle, feel depressed, and am perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop. When I was in Japan, I worked too much to get more than about three hours of free time during the week, because I was always exhausted. One of the best random days I had in Japan was one Friday morning when I awakened at 4 in the morning because I had slept solidly since 8 p.m. There was a challenge for lands_of_magic I was trying to finish before I went to work (I didn't and luckily there was an extension), but it was nice to just sort of exist in that no-one-else's time where I felt compelled to be creative and make something and it didn't feel like I was wasting my time or racing against a clock. I intended to go back to bed, and I didn't. By the end of the day I was hilariously fried, but it was a day when I felt more alive than I had in a long time.