Monday

I'm having lots of good Thinky Thoughts about this morning's tarot card pull. I want to write a Patreon post about it/them. I even know what direction I want to go with it, but my mind* is resisting hard. It's an actual physical sensation of putting on the brakes when I consider opening up LibreOffice. I thought about using Mel Robbin's five-second rule to Just Do It before something clicked for me.

(For me, "mind" = brain and body in communication with each other)

I've never had issues with executive dysfunction. For the vast majority of my life I did what I wanted when I wanted to do it. And I would still be doing most of those things if my body could accommodate them. But because of that ability, I pushed myself hard for years to the detriment of my physical (and mental) health. So why do I think this resistance to Doing The Thing is now a brain block that can be remedied by counting down to lift-off?

As humans we are wired for stasis. We crave the return to "normal" even when normal is unhealthy and destructive (see: Society's embrace of COVID denial in order to resume eating in restaurants, going in public unmasked, required on-site work, etc.). It makes sense that my mind is resisting my desire to sit down and write. It knows better.

I don't think it's executive dysfunction and I know it's not that I don't want to write the essay. It's that my mind knows writing two things in two days (I put up a Patreon post yesterday) will wipe me out for the rest of the day, and possibly tomorrow. It's not unlikely that my instinctive resistance to writing something requiring a significant amount of brain power is a result of my mind trying to protect itself from me.

Unfortunately this sort of enforced rest conflicts in unpleasant ways with my isolation. Boredom and loneliness are a terrible, terrible combination.