you’re unlikely to be less tired tomorrow if your tiredness is actually emotional knottedness, which requires dynamic action rather than rest
sometimes what you need is “strength training”
;;;
via (archives/junkyard-of-vague-intentions) “knottedness // It’s probably true that I might’ve benefited from a break, but I didn’t want to do that, either. Ideas about emotional knottedness come to mind. When you have a knot in a muscle, simply resting doesn’t bring relief. You have to get into the knot somehow. You need to do something dynamic to release the tension. Lying in bed all day can actually make it worse. Similarly, I believe that emotional knottedness, or creative knottedness, often needs some kind of dynamic solution. I needed to write my way out. And I think I’m halfway through that process right now.
I just did a search for “emotional knottedness” on my twitter, and a click here and there and I found myself back in 2021, when I was knotted about Introspect, the book I was working on at the time. And here the startling insight is that facing the truth of the matter is something that provides relief.
There are many different things that I want to do, and it can be tricksy to tease apart what are the things that arise from my body, my heart, my emotional felt sense, and what are the things that my conscious thinky-talky authoritarian mind has imposed top-down. But navigating by surprise and delight seems to be the correct approach.”
✱
snippet from a draft about being overwhelmed by my own writing:
Elsewhere I’ve written that tiredness is sometimes actually ‘emotional knottedness’. Rest doesn’t do much for knotted muscles: you have to move them, knead them, really get into the knots and work them out. I believe that emotional knots are similar. The pain or discomfort may diminish slightly with time, but it may also get worse if you’re not actively doing something about it. I’ve definitely had this play out with some emotional issues in the past, and I suspect I’m in the middle of one now. It’s about my relationship with my body of work. My situation is hilariously recursive: I have written multiple drafts about it (the situation), and these drafts are themselves sprawling and chaotic, which leads to more knottedness. A part of me fantasizes that I could slice the knot in one fell swoop, as Alexander was said to have done in Gordium. But I suspect that if I am to learn something from the stories of Alexander that applies to my situation, it would not be the slicing of a Gordian knot, but rather it would be akin to the taming of his stallion, Bucephalus. As the story goes, all the men who tried to tame Bucephalus with force failed. The ever observant Alexander noticed that the horse wasn’t angry, but was actually frightened of its own shadow. And so he took the horse by its bridle, turned it to face the sun such their shadows were behind them, and as Plutarch put it, “curbed him without either striking or spurring him”.
There’s something profound here about the power of observation, properly diagnosing the problem. If my problem is persisting and my attempts to solve it are not making any progress, there’s a good chance that I’m misdiagnosing the problem.
tbc
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