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sharing with permission from the DMs because I feel it might be helpful to other people IME, distractions, rehearsals, procrastination, etc are not a waste of time – they're safety rituals https://t.co/kwKlogweHI
the meta thing is, this sort of conversation itself will become a safety ritual if you don't then take some action that changes the game. I think a good way to do this without bullshitting yourself is to take some new (small) action that you've not taken before (or recently)
but also, you can live your entire life as a sitcom rather than an adventure, that's perfectly fine. you can live a life full of safety rituals, and be safe, and warm, and take care of yourself and those around you, and that can be a good life
i'm reflecting on how layered it is 1. there's some desire in ur heart 2. follow it, get burned. pain 3. create a barrier around the desire, lock it up 4. now feel cold, desolate 5. feel bad abt cold 6. beat self up for feeling bad 7. detach 8. ugh why am i so bored & listless
if at stage 8 you then think the problem is that you don't have a good enough note-taking system, you can then end up spending years avoiding yourself and your real issues. fixating on the wrong part of the problem is a kind of self-soothing safety ritual https://t.co/jZuQSIQrDW
which isn't to say that notes can't help! literally the first thing I advocate for is extensive journalling. but the point – if you really want true relief – is to use the journalling to bring you closer to the root of your problems, and to help you take action to address them
or not! it is truly entirely up to you. you can bullshit yourself and lie to yourself if you want. that is a choice you can make. I used to be very bothered when I saw other people doing this but now I feel quite a bit more at ease with it. Each person is on their own journey
why it bothered me – it was me projecting my own shadow onto other people. at some point I internalized self-loathing re: weakness and incompetence. I grew to believe that my weakness was the source of everything bad in my life. and seeing it in others distressed me
but increasingly I see, clearer than ever, that my aversion to weakness, my contempt of my own incompetence, these are the walls of my own psychic prison. only by embracing my own weakness was I able to begin to breathe again. and it made me stronger https://t.co/3CcNgEEoQz
"at some point I internalized self-loathing" is a euphemistic way to avoid saying "people treated me horribly". facing the truth of having been mistreated can be emotionally overwhelming. avoiding it is much easier. but of course, then life is cold, boring, and weirdly tense
and you know, interestingly, once you get into that a couple of times, it's actually possible to then go way too deep into that, and turn the victim label into a suffocating safety blanket. it's tricky to talk about, because again, everyone is on their own journey...
but right now where I'm looking at it all from this sort of unusually peak vantage point, I kind of have to laugh, because, oh gosh. everyone has a point. everybody has a reason to be scared. even the people who bullshit and lie, they have a reason to do that. it all makes sense
and when people fight and argue with each other on the internet instead of working through their own issues, well, they have a reason to do that too! and I have a reason I'm doing this thread instead of finishing my 99.8% complete book. haa... catch ya later 😂❤️. love to all
procrastination is a sub-type of reactivity (resistance to felt emotions). reactivity, as a category, cant be one-shotted (canonically) one isnt resisting the situation itself, they're resisting the sensations arising from it either via narrative (thought) or distractions https://t.co/wSQghVEhBw
@visakanv i like the reframe. a riff of mine is that when stuck on a problem, feeling discomfort (which often -> procrastination) is an adaptive signal to stop banging ur head against a wall & consider shifting frame i guess procrastinating is a safety ritual for if you don't get the memo
@visakanv Holy cats. This so completely and absolutely describes me that I keep rereading it, try to double check if it was me who wrote this. If you didn't say it was shared with permission, I would like 90% think this must have been me and I just forgot