Slump

I have been spending entirely too much of my time recently reading the Ludicity blog and trying not to absorb their cynicism, but it does tend to stick.

I've been in a slump lately. No exercise in the last four days, despite writing about it in 31 days of working out. No code slinging recently, despite writing that hard things are hard and are worth doing. The inner critic has been having a whale of a time in the mornings - the mental equivalent of flipping tables and yelling incoherent abuse at me until ejected by the well meaning bouncer combination of coffee and something to do.

It just occurred to be in the last 30 minutes that my recent insights into improving work productivity are, at their core, an entire 3 hours of producing, rewriting, and editing draft content in the morning, followed by... 3 hours in the afternoon of coughing up editorial hairballs into the next round of documents.

All because it's easier to edit a huge chunk of writing into resembling something meaningful than face the existential dread of an empty page when the coffee hasn't quite started working yet and the inner critic is still leaving spittle on the outside of the windows of my mind. (I'm three coffees deep at this point, and this is being written in the afternoon when all I want to do is sleep - so I may decide to rewrite it later or just say fuck it and hit publish).

The point is being arrived at, albeit in a lengthy way. I'm in a slump, but I'm also in therapy, so there's that.

Therapy is a different thing for us old folks. I'm in my fifties, so when you think about the history that shapes you, there is a lot of baggage being dragged around. I am painfully aware of this, and as my therapist has warned me, we're about to start digging into the stuff I thought was neatly tied up in a bow and buried deep at the back of my mind. This is going to be painful.

But in a perverse way, I kind of look forward to it.

There is a crappy analogy buried here, but I'll go with it anyway: Therapy is like cleaning. Well, more accurately, it's like finally facing that cupboard that you've been storing crap in for years, and being determined to clear it out.

Digging deep into all the stuff you've been keeping for decades, opening up the myriad of boxes, looking with awe at the old memories, and then rather than deciding to keep them around, just throwing them away to make room for more positive stuff. That's what I'm seeing it as, anyway. I know there are going to be a lot of coping strategies involved because it's not easy to throw away old memories - they tend to linger and leave their stench around.

And that process of opening up those old boxes is going to hurt, because I'm going to have to face exactly why they are still sticking around, and what keeping them is doing to me as a person right now.

Anyway, I thought I'd write this as an acknowledgement that not much has been going on that I could write about, but there is actually loads going on in the background and while it will get worse before it gets better, there are plenty of other things for me to document as I navigate my path out.

Even writing this has fired up some ideas about the past, and my attitudes, and some of them have likely contributed to the slump - so best to write them down and stop them hanging around in my brain, making themselves at home when they are in fact deeply unwelcome.