Introspective

Fury is all very well, but check yourself before you wreck yourself.

The first draft of this post was called ‘Discipline’ and was horrible.

Not horrible as in badly written, but rather horrible as in that’s not me, and it’s not the person I want to be, either.

It’s all very well to live your life fueled by fury and snark, but tread carefully, or one day you shall find that fury hath no other target than yourself, and that results in bloody awful posts on your personal website that you would have regretted a couple of weeks later.

So far, I regret nothing. Sure, I’m a bit sweary in places, but that’s who I am IRL. I can be a bit judgemental, and more than a bit sarcastic, but that’s still all me.

What I am is introspective - sometimes to my detriment, but I’m working on that - and absolutely bloody determined when I want to be. It’s no coincidence that I find the most entertaining posts on the interent are written by ADHD people; while I’m not necessarily one of them (correlation isn’t causation, after all), I can still find more in common with those types than the ’normies’.

So this post is a short note on introspection.

Done well, it can cause you to reconsider your decisions in light of thoughtfulness, and sometimes you can choose to follow them anyway because that’s what you actually want, and sometimes you can realise that your decision was a knee-jerk reaction and following that path would be a dumb thing to do.

I am considering a lot of choices I’ve made about personal development at the moment, and in the spirit of clearing out an old garage or loft, I’m throwing a lot of things away - things that I clung onto in the hope that a future me who was better organised and in actual fact an entirely different person would be able to make use of them.

What I’ve come to realise is that person is never going to exist, and clinging onto worthless trinkets is a hopeless cause that just burdens me with mental debt. Far better to throw that stuff out and make some space.

You might have seen those stories on TV (generally ones that claimed to be serious documentaries, but were often simply an excuse to point at ‘different’ people under the guise of examining different behaviour) about hoarders; poor souls who kept everything they have and often turned their homes into rabbit warrens carved through pillars of newspaper and whole rooms dedicated to storage of stuff they had long since forgotten about. There are strong parallels between those people and the inside of my head.

I’d worn a rut treading the same old path because I was storing so much stuff around me ‘in case I needed it in the future’, and that rut began to define who I am, and not leave any room for anything else.

Clearing out space (mentally, and physically), has given me a little more flexibility.

I’m still throwing things out, little by little - more just letting go than throwing away - and for once, I’m giving myself room to see a wider path, more options, and less constraint.

Introspection can be a good thing, when harnessed, controlled, and valued for insight.

I’m living proof, albeit a work in progress.