might as well talk about it out loud: i experience a deep aversion to putting stuff to do on my calendar (other than say, salons i’m hosting, meetups, etc which are like, “show up at this time”)
i instinctively feel that i won’t follow my own plans. (relevant: trust bankruptcy)
and when I notice that i’ve failed to follow up with my own plan, I feel an intense shame, like it’s this searing reminder of my own incompetence. i feel my parents and teachers etc all yelling at me, 15 years later, inside my head, and I inwardly cower and hide
this is probably the tightest bottleneck re: “what’s stopping visa from doing even more/better than he’s already doing”
and even without this productivity-biased frame i’m just plain tired of it. i’m ready to teach myself calendars the way I taught myself to cook
i have tried to face this every year since I was about 12, and i have basically failed every single year. i might be being too harsh with myself here. maybe after i ship my book i’ll do like a 20 year review of all the incomplete calendars i have and piece it together
it’s actually bonkers to really say it out loud, like– when you ask me to put something on my calendar I experience it as pain. I experience it as “I’m going to write this down, and it’s going to scream at me as I disappoint it, disappoint you, disappoint everyone”.
I’m not being dramatic or exaggerating for effect or anything, that’s literally how it feels. every time I try to put something on a calendar, I would rather get zapped by an electric shock or be snapped with a rubber band or pinched real hard or something.
interesting thing is I do know how rehab works in other domains. it starts with “so small it feels silly” innocuous baby step things, like “do one pushup”, scheduled for right now, and do it immediately. and in this domain i cannot be clever about it, because of the screaming
another interesting thing is, theoretically speaking, the fact that I have been a functional adult for this long means that I have basically sort of “redestributed” my cognition ~around~ calendars. like, I find ways to manage. I make a living. I have a wife. things are good
but like, bc I avoid calendars almost entirely, they are like abandoned, derelict haunted houses, with very old, evil emotions swirling around their murky depths, threatening to drown me. they have not updated to match my life. ahhh it’s a schoolboat
“A sense of annihilatory panic… intense sense of threat… if I have to feel this feeling, I will cease to exist” )!(%!@)%(!@%!)(%!@%!@%(!%! ah god damnit fine fine fine ok
messages from the wounded inner child eh. I gotchu kid. I gotchu. ❤️
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my aversion to containers (dec2022, original thread)
learning something about myself: there’s a class of thing I don’t like, not because I don’t like the spirit thing, but because I don’t like the traditional structure of the thing. this explains my aversion to: classrooms, therapists, editors, book clubs, online courses…
none of those things are intrisically bad, and in fact if you examine my life you’ll find that i have elaborate alternate versions of each and all of those things, often “splayed out” across time and space rather than condensed to a point. my threads themselves are an example
i’m feeling something like relief at noticing this. turns out a few distinct struggles that i seem to have are all actually the same thing. fuck, i also hate jobs, and this is why i don’t have a job. it’s all the same thing
it’s not that i’m against the process contained within the container, it’s that i hate containers
additional wild thing to consider is that i’ve spent a lot of my life being in denial about my own preferences, I have so often said “oh no its ok no worries its not a big deal” when I really want to say “absolutely fucking not”,
and the thing i do know about suppressed preferences, when unmetabolized, come out in ugly, inconvenient bursts when they’re least helpful
but hey none of my inconvenient outbursts have ruined my life yet so i think i’m doing ok
whole new dimension of thing to reconceptualize. kinda exciting. kinda makes me wanna throw up. i dont think my preferences will change but I think I can be more loosey-goosey about navigating them. (schoolboat again)