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Spoons
I hadn't come across spoon theory before (already, I see, like most things on the modern Internet, the subject of complaints about appropriation, trivialization, and who is more victimised than whom...)
It does echo in a way what I feel, which I've been categorising to myself as an endless litany of "but I'm so tired"... but where 'tired' doesn't represent lack of sleep or physical aches, but of constant, dragging effort to do anything at all difficult, where 'difficult' is almost invariably emotional rather than objectively hard. It's somewhat like what I've always thought of as 'push', of which one only has so much before becoming completely dispirited.
But it isn't that I can't. It isn't that I don't have the energy. It isn't even, in most cases, that it's a matter of doing something which I find actively daunting or frightening (like going to complain about things, or dealing with angry people). It really does feel from my perspective like laziness and lack of self-discipline, because I know perfectly well that if I had someone standing over me to disapprove then I *would* do these things; things as simple as answering emails, which, once I start, I indeed tend to do at some length, or as complex as finding and fixing bugs in a program, or as necessary as washing-up or mending clothes. The fact that I have the option not to do them if they feel in the least difficult makes it possible for me to end up doing nothing at all, when just 'having a list' and 'sitting down to it' would potentially achieve so much more; what makes it worse is that, like a slimmer who claims to want to lose weight, I know all the suggested strategies for overcoming the problem and yet I don't attempt to deploy them because it's easier just to continually fail and feel guilty than to do anything active about it.
Yes, it is stress and depression (and, I think, to some extent some form of manic depression, which causes me to attempt laborious and labour-intensive projects and then feel guilty when the 'high' has gone and I abandon them... but maybe that's just normal human nature, judging by the number of abandoned stories/blogs/software rewrites/unpractised instruments out there). Just existing feels like incredibly hard work, and just getting up can seem to take hours during which I abandon the task in favour of easier and less challenging activities. (And yet if I actually need to get up, e.g. if I wake in a panic realising that I was supposed to be somewhere else ten minutes ago, I'm perfectly capable of doing it in about five minutes flat; it is not inability but on some level disinclination.)
I don't think the 'spoons' are really that good an analogy; it's true that it takes a significant amount of 'push' to get over the purely mental barrier to achieving/attempting anything, and that I only seem to have a limited supply of that per day before I feel completely exhausted by the effort of making myself do things, but the limiting factor is not the energy required for the activity itself (e.g. sending off a form or sewing up a hole), but the energy required simply to do something you happen not to feel like tackling at the present moment. Which I'm afraid really does seem to me like a moral deficiency that one is supposed to overcome in childhood (and that, back when I was 'well', I really think I had, or as much as anyone else, anyhow), rather than like a badge of deserving disability.
And writing is a whole other issue; I actually do seem to be finding that more and more laborious as I get older, and I don't know if that's a drying-up of creativity or staling of subject matter or ever-increasing self-criticism. In that case you've got the *two* barriers: the usual one of tackling something which feels difficult, plus the secondary one of actually finding it difficult to get anywhere once you've got as far as trying! But in the case of proof-reading, editing, and publishing existing work, for example, it really is a lack of 'push'. It is not that difficult to check back a typescript against a manuscript, even given the labyrinthine state of some of my manuscript, and it is even less difficult to export edited data from one format to another... and yet I find it easier to pick up a pen and send myself out for a walk with my current project in the certain knowledge that I'll probably struggle to put down more than a few sentences on paper, rather than attempt to do the boring scut-work on a project that has already been virtually completed.
In my further attempts at self-analysis, I wonder how much of that is down to fear of failure and rejection, and the subconscious thought that work which is never finalised or never made public will never be able to fail? But even that doesn't account to finding it difficult to get down to uploading 'proven' stories to AO3, for example -- the fact that I've established from my experience to date that they are likely to do worse there than they did on their original publication isn't much of an incentive, admittedly, and publishing too many all at once is definitely not a good tactic from a purely cynical, self-interested point of view, but not getting round to it at all is not in my own interest under any circumstances. It's just that when I contemplate the idea, I feel so tired...
It's past six o'clock.
So far today, I have managed to cook an elaborate lasagne using meat and milk and tomatoes and cheese, and nearly tasty enough to justify the expenditure of all those luxury items (cooking doesn't come under the heading of 'things I find difficult', for some reason, even if I am fairly inefficient at it time-wise), to dash out and rescue yesterday's washing from the line in my pyjamas after discovering that it was blowing a gale and starting to rain (amazing how quickly I can get out of bed under the influence of adrenalin when I have visions of my clothes disappearing over the rooftops!), and to mostly get dressed, minus the shoes. It's now dark, and I never did get round to checking on my seedlings outside. I found the pen that I lost after refilling it and putting it down at random, and I fixed a computer bug that manifested to prevent me from reading any of my old fanfic files. That is, I think, the sum total of my achievements for the day.
I haven't taken any exercise, I haven't washed (but I only do that a couple of times a week anyway, unless I really seem to need it), I still haven't got round to cutting my hair yet again, I haven't transcribed the music for violin that I was playing off the piano score (and consequently haven't been playing it, because further practice has been delayed in favour of the constantly-postponed transcription), I haven't emailed the author of the music OCR software to ask him if it's still available ten years or so after it was written (and consequently haven't attempted the manual transcription which I could probably have completed by now), I haven't done any more work on updating the software documentation for the freeware that has had a major upgrade, I haven't done any more work on the software I was writing that would enable me to upload fanfic to my website much more painlessly (and consequently haven't done any more of the uploads, and consequently haven't uploaded anything to AO3 because I'd told myself I was going to do the uploads in parallel this time round to ensure that the site was kept up to date), I haven't done the proofreading of the material I succeeded in typing on Arctic Raoul and hence haven't sent it off for beta-reading (partly because I have been half-consciously delaying until I got back the detailed feedback from the last batch, but realistically I don't think that's going to happen any time soon... and if it did, I know very well that I would then be postponing doing any more work on the grounds that I couldn't face doing the necessary edits first!), and there are various other self-imposed tasks that I have in a state of semi-completion that I haven't attempted either. And every day I don't do these things.
Meanwhile I'm very conscious that I'm running out of time on the things that I do try to make sure I do every day, namely taking my manuscript for a walk (which always seems to keep getting delayed until it's cold and after dark, rather than being an excuse for a walk in the sun!) and working on my singing, which is a physical training issue that has to be done at least for a little at least most days in a week. Those are the two things that actually have to be kept going, for fear of the long-term consequences... or perhaps they are the only two things that I genuinely care about enough to use up my 'push' on, or perhaps they are the only things for which I've succeeded in establishing anything like a healthy habit :-(
They tend to be done badly and in a scramble at the last minute, but I do try to do them. I mostly enjoy the singing once I get started; that used to be the case with the writing, but it's feeling so difficult over these last few years that I'm not sure it's true any more. I do get a sort of sense of achievement when I come home with a sentence or two that I know wouldn't have happened if I'd simply sat and played computer games compulsively back indoors... but I'm so rarely happy with the overall result these days. I'm just focused on the desperate attempt to keep going and to finish so that I don't have to worry about it any more (the obvious answer to which would be not to start another one! I do still have that Christine crossover idea worrying at me, though -- but I'm afraid it wouldn't be a case of 'the nicest possessed car in the world', but of two obsessive corpse-haunted evils deserving one another, at least so far as my ideas had got).
I am just... so... tired.
And I don't even have the issue of holding down an honest job -- ironically I doubt that would actually make a lot of difference. It isn't that sort of tired, or of not having time. It's just... just a complete flaccidness of the will.
(And now it's nearly seven o'clock and I absolutely need to go out and write at least something on Hertha. I'm still trying to find a way into that backstory for Christine, and I actually had some phrases ready about Carlotta before my pen ran dry, and I may be within sight of a way to get the chapter finished or at least to head in that direction, if I just get down to making an effort to do it, after postponing it for hours and hours. And I did want to watch the next episode of "The Terror", which means I probably don't have time to squeeze that and singing practice in between before it gets too late... Not just 'first-world problems', but completely pointless and self-inflicted problems.)
It does echo in a way what I feel, which I've been categorising to myself as an endless litany of "but I'm so tired"... but where 'tired' doesn't represent lack of sleep or physical aches, but of constant, dragging effort to do anything at all difficult, where 'difficult' is almost invariably emotional rather than objectively hard. It's somewhat like what I've always thought of as 'push', of which one only has so much before becoming completely dispirited.
But it isn't that I can't. It isn't that I don't have the energy. It isn't even, in most cases, that it's a matter of doing something which I find actively daunting or frightening (like going to complain about things, or dealing with angry people). It really does feel from my perspective like laziness and lack of self-discipline, because I know perfectly well that if I had someone standing over me to disapprove then I *would* do these things; things as simple as answering emails, which, once I start, I indeed tend to do at some length, or as complex as finding and fixing bugs in a program, or as necessary as washing-up or mending clothes. The fact that I have the option not to do them if they feel in the least difficult makes it possible for me to end up doing nothing at all, when just 'having a list' and 'sitting down to it' would potentially achieve so much more; what makes it worse is that, like a slimmer who claims to want to lose weight, I know all the suggested strategies for overcoming the problem and yet I don't attempt to deploy them because it's easier just to continually fail and feel guilty than to do anything active about it.
Yes, it is stress and depression (and, I think, to some extent some form of manic depression, which causes me to attempt laborious and labour-intensive projects and then feel guilty when the 'high' has gone and I abandon them... but maybe that's just normal human nature, judging by the number of abandoned stories/blogs/software rewrites/unpractised instruments out there). Just existing feels like incredibly hard work, and just getting up can seem to take hours during which I abandon the task in favour of easier and less challenging activities. (And yet if I actually need to get up, e.g. if I wake in a panic realising that I was supposed to be somewhere else ten minutes ago, I'm perfectly capable of doing it in about five minutes flat; it is not inability but on some level disinclination.)
I don't think the 'spoons' are really that good an analogy; it's true that it takes a significant amount of 'push' to get over the purely mental barrier to achieving/attempting anything, and that I only seem to have a limited supply of that per day before I feel completely exhausted by the effort of making myself do things, but the limiting factor is not the energy required for the activity itself (e.g. sending off a form or sewing up a hole), but the energy required simply to do something you happen not to feel like tackling at the present moment. Which I'm afraid really does seem to me like a moral deficiency that one is supposed to overcome in childhood (and that, back when I was 'well', I really think I had, or as much as anyone else, anyhow), rather than like a badge of deserving disability.
And writing is a whole other issue; I actually do seem to be finding that more and more laborious as I get older, and I don't know if that's a drying-up of creativity or staling of subject matter or ever-increasing self-criticism. In that case you've got the *two* barriers: the usual one of tackling something which feels difficult, plus the secondary one of actually finding it difficult to get anywhere once you've got as far as trying! But in the case of proof-reading, editing, and publishing existing work, for example, it really is a lack of 'push'. It is not that difficult to check back a typescript against a manuscript, even given the labyrinthine state of some of my manuscript, and it is even less difficult to export edited data from one format to another... and yet I find it easier to pick up a pen and send myself out for a walk with my current project in the certain knowledge that I'll probably struggle to put down more than a few sentences on paper, rather than attempt to do the boring scut-work on a project that has already been virtually completed.
In my further attempts at self-analysis, I wonder how much of that is down to fear of failure and rejection, and the subconscious thought that work which is never finalised or never made public will never be able to fail? But even that doesn't account to finding it difficult to get down to uploading 'proven' stories to AO3, for example -- the fact that I've established from my experience to date that they are likely to do worse there than they did on their original publication isn't much of an incentive, admittedly, and publishing too many all at once is definitely not a good tactic from a purely cynical, self-interested point of view, but not getting round to it at all is not in my own interest under any circumstances. It's just that when I contemplate the idea, I feel so tired...
It's past six o'clock.
So far today, I have managed to cook an elaborate lasagne using meat and milk and tomatoes and cheese, and nearly tasty enough to justify the expenditure of all those luxury items (cooking doesn't come under the heading of 'things I find difficult', for some reason, even if I am fairly inefficient at it time-wise), to dash out and rescue yesterday's washing from the line in my pyjamas after discovering that it was blowing a gale and starting to rain (amazing how quickly I can get out of bed under the influence of adrenalin when I have visions of my clothes disappearing over the rooftops!), and to mostly get dressed, minus the shoes. It's now dark, and I never did get round to checking on my seedlings outside. I found the pen that I lost after refilling it and putting it down at random, and I fixed a computer bug that manifested to prevent me from reading any of my old fanfic files. That is, I think, the sum total of my achievements for the day.
I haven't taken any exercise, I haven't washed (but I only do that a couple of times a week anyway, unless I really seem to need it), I still haven't got round to cutting my hair yet again, I haven't transcribed the music for violin that I was playing off the piano score (and consequently haven't been playing it, because further practice has been delayed in favour of the constantly-postponed transcription), I haven't emailed the author of the music OCR software to ask him if it's still available ten years or so after it was written (and consequently haven't attempted the manual transcription which I could probably have completed by now), I haven't done any more work on updating the software documentation for the freeware that has had a major upgrade, I haven't done any more work on the software I was writing that would enable me to upload fanfic to my website much more painlessly (and consequently haven't done any more of the uploads, and consequently haven't uploaded anything to AO3 because I'd told myself I was going to do the uploads in parallel this time round to ensure that the site was kept up to date), I haven't done the proofreading of the material I succeeded in typing on Arctic Raoul and hence haven't sent it off for beta-reading (partly because I have been half-consciously delaying until I got back the detailed feedback from the last batch, but realistically I don't think that's going to happen any time soon... and if it did, I know very well that I would then be postponing doing any more work on the grounds that I couldn't face doing the necessary edits first!), and there are various other self-imposed tasks that I have in a state of semi-completion that I haven't attempted either. And every day I don't do these things.
Meanwhile I'm very conscious that I'm running out of time on the things that I do try to make sure I do every day, namely taking my manuscript for a walk (which always seems to keep getting delayed until it's cold and after dark, rather than being an excuse for a walk in the sun!) and working on my singing, which is a physical training issue that has to be done at least for a little at least most days in a week. Those are the two things that actually have to be kept going, for fear of the long-term consequences... or perhaps they are the only two things that I genuinely care about enough to use up my 'push' on, or perhaps they are the only things for which I've succeeded in establishing anything like a healthy habit :-(
They tend to be done badly and in a scramble at the last minute, but I do try to do them. I mostly enjoy the singing once I get started; that used to be the case with the writing, but it's feeling so difficult over these last few years that I'm not sure it's true any more. I do get a sort of sense of achievement when I come home with a sentence or two that I know wouldn't have happened if I'd simply sat and played computer games compulsively back indoors... but I'm so rarely happy with the overall result these days. I'm just focused on the desperate attempt to keep going and to finish so that I don't have to worry about it any more (the obvious answer to which would be not to start another one! I do still have that Christine crossover idea worrying at me, though -- but I'm afraid it wouldn't be a case of 'the nicest possessed car in the world', but of two obsessive corpse-haunted evils deserving one another, at least so far as my ideas had got).
I am just... so... tired.
And I don't even have the issue of holding down an honest job -- ironically I doubt that would actually make a lot of difference. It isn't that sort of tired, or of not having time. It's just... just a complete flaccidness of the will.
(And now it's nearly seven o'clock and I absolutely need to go out and write at least something on Hertha. I'm still trying to find a way into that backstory for Christine, and I actually had some phrases ready about Carlotta before my pen ran dry, and I may be within sight of a way to get the chapter finished or at least to head in that direction, if I just get down to making an effort to do it, after postponing it for hours and hours. And I did want to watch the next episode of "The Terror", which means I probably don't have time to squeeze that and singing practice in between before it gets too late... Not just 'first-world problems', but completely pointless and self-inflicted problems.)
no subject
I know how you're feeling; I've had bouts of depression, too, and days where I struggle to get anything done at all. I've found that habit-tracking apps and nanowrimo.org really help me.
I'd offer you a virtual hug, but I don't know if you like them...
no subject
I did take my manuscript out for a walk last night, and after a considerable amount of walking I did start to get things written -- probably a couple of hundred words, even. (I got a little too enthusiastic about the way that both Carlotta and Christine filled out their costumes in dress rehearsal -- I was trying to indicate the period mindset about what was a desirable figure, so Hertha has hip- and bosom-envy ;-p)
I then managed to squeeze in half an hour's singing practice, albeit about fifteen minutes of that was spent in the dictionary trying to work out some of the very poetic language used in An die Nachtigall -- I still don't know what verb Geuß can possibly come from. And I did manage to catch the broadcast of "The Terror", though I'm still not sure if I like it or not ;-p
So you could say my chief goals for the day were achieved, although it's now nearly six o'clock again and I'm back in a similar situation with nothing done today, save another batch of washing rushed in and out between showers and more or less dry. I just don't do anything unless a deadline rushes up on me.
no subject
I have this problem, too (and some of your specific examples sound very familiar, though my instrument is not the violin).
My theory is that in my case it's a question of having definite consequences. Having somebody standing over me disapprovingly is a definite consequence; the laundry getting soaked in five minutes is a definite consequence; embarrassing everyone at the concert tomorrow by messing up my solo is a definite consequence. The desire to avoid a definite consequence is a solid thing that I can wield against the various indefinite but powerful worries that can drag me down and prevent me from doing things that I theoretically want to do.
But a deadline lacks definition unless it's imminent. And self-set goals don't seem to count, because the brain weasels know that they're all in my head (which unfortunately seems to mean that I can't just create a definite consequence when there's one lacking).
no subject
It requires a definite consequence in the form of a practical deadline (e.g. 'I can't decently belt out high Cs at the neighbours after 9pm or they will complain').
Or in other words, my subconscious apparently only responds to the prospect of imminent punishment and not to rewards, which tends to reinforce my self-image of moral weakness rather than of being in need of encouragment: 'what's the good of pandering to the underclasses when all they understand is the firm crack of the whip?'
no subject
Aw, I love that my joking about Christine apparently took off! "Two obsessive corpse-haunted evils deserving one another"? So you have idea for a dark!Christine story? Appropriate for King crossover. It sounds like something that would have E/C as the endgame or main pairing, which would be highly unusual for you (unless we're talking about a genuine R/C with a dark murderous Raoul, which would be even more unusual).
no subject
So you don't get the endless half-finished (or 'half-baked'? ;-p) results hanging over you. It gets done, it gets consumed, and then eventually it has to get washed up before you next need the saucepans/utensils/sink space...
I was thinking simply in terms of a oneshot Stephen King AU where Erik covets Christine-the-car and succeeds in getting to her before 'the boy'; Arnie would be the Raoul-analogue in this universe, so E/C would be basically a better outcome for everybody. Except possibly Erik, but he doesn't know that :-P