Weekly Observations: Week 31 🔄
Pulse check. It’s simultaneously beautiful and tragic how cyclical life can be sometimes. While I appreciate the consistency of knowing what to expect, the feeling of being trapped in a hamster wheel, constantly spinning in never-ending circles and being confronted with the same shit over and over, is also soul-crushing in its own right. I read a surprisingly good book recently about trend casting, which reiterated the nature of trends and how it’s all just about oscillation from one extreme to the other and then back. What’s not in fashion comes back into play, and what you’re feeling now will be the opposite.
I can see that as the case for emotions too, where sometimes the only consistent thing you can count on is that they’re ever changing and always rotating. I’ve come to accept the good times when they come and to savor them, but there’s a part of me that now instinctually braces for the inevitable downturn, for the other shoe to drop. And when it does, I try to reassure myself with the knowledge that it’s temporary, that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Things are never as extreme as they seem: they’re not as good as you probably make it out to be, nor are they as shit as you might think them to be. That’s a relief I suppose.
Yet somehow I naively find myself surprised to have returned to the same place I was several years ago, with a revolving door of friends coming in and out of my life and finding myself once again alone. The saddest thing is that at the peak, I thought I’d conquered my problem once and for all with the communities I’d built up around me, but of course, I suppose I should have known that things are never quite that easy. What goes up must come down.
When things are feeling bad, it feels like I’m an outsider on the periphery looking in, desperately wanting to be accepted, to be in the midst of something. I’ve been through enough cycles to know that this feeling comes and goes, but I recognize now that it’s one of my deepest insecurities that I’ll always keep returning back to. (There’s definitely something to childhood traumas and hang-ups following you for the rest of your life.) And as I think about this, I wonder about what that might look like for everyone else.
When I go back to try and dissect how it all happened, how it unfolded, I don’t see a clear root cause. I suppose some of it’s on me, but I think there’s a degree of group complicity as well — it makes me sad to realize that group dynamics are so fragile, so easily built up but then also torn down. These days, I often feel disconnected, disassociated from myself: I’m trying to do the right things, yet still struggle to break through, to feel the same joy in life that I know I’m capable of. I feel pretty empty inside most days — is this what going through the motions feels like?
To that end, I’m also so tired of feeling like a mess, of being in mild constant crisis, of feeling like I don’t have it all together. For someone that has such outward stability in her life, I feel like I don’t have much of it.
On attention spans. I feel like I have the attention span of a gerbil these days (surprise, surprise). I’m not quite sure how much of this is just my personality and my preference for breadth vs. it being whittled away over time with my phone and the endless distractions that’re so aplenty these days. Either way, I find myself with little patience for things that are hard and take time. There’re all these creative pursuits that pique my interest, but somehow once I realize the amount of effort, of time that go into it, I’m put off, less enthused. I want to flex these muscles, developing that sense of perseverance, of dedication. I’ve become far too used to instant gratification, of constant dopamine hits.
Case in point: at times, I get really tired of being such a millennial: selfish, self-centered, being so solely focused on my own happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment. Thoughts at that point inevitably turn towards the community and helping others, but it’s sad and embarrassing how quickly that urge dissipates. I’ll decide to schedule one thing, sign up for a volunteer list and before I know it, I’m back to thinking about me, me, me again. I want to stick with it, stick with something that doesn’t always feel great, that doesn’t always feel exciting. Maybe that’s the problem: my over-optimization constantly pushes me towards grabbing the easy wins, the quickest sources of happiness. Once the going gets hard, I bail, off to find the next shiny thing. I need to learn to embrace the mundanity, the slow bits, the parts that are unexciting and sometimes shit, but always inevitable. That’s a thought, hm.
