This one is tricky.
As I mentioned on my previous newsletter, I am in a long process of uncluttering my home. No, I am not a hoarder, I just accumulated stuff through the years. I bought things here and there that, in their own time, became unused. Not useless, just unused. And it is very easy to simply forget about them. As time goes by, the lack of storage space, the things that are loose or in boxes getting in the way it all starts to…well, get in the way. And everyday you think to yourself that soon you will get that sorted. Only you don’t. Specially if you are, like myself, a professional procrastinator. And I resist strongly to simply chuck things away, in the trash. I do believe that if an item is still intact, usable, there’s someone out there who could have a use for it. There could be money in it. Or you could jut be avoiding more stuff to end up in the landfill. But you let it roll and when you least notice, months have passed and nothing has been dealt with.
You see, it is very easy to simply let the daily grind overcome us, driving our minds into a state of “going with the flow”. Only that at this point we have no control whatsoever over this routine. And what it does is eat us from the inside. Everything becomes annoying, boring, irritating; every activity brings close to no joy; sitting at home brings no peace; going for a ride is the same as going to work. And then comes that feeling of “heavy soul”.
It is not my intention to even pretend to give a lecture here on mental health, but this newsletter is coming, sometimes, as an extension of my journal. Journaling comes with much difficulty at times, so I try to write something, of whatever importance, everyday. The objective being keeping my thoughts in order, planning ahead or recollecting what has happened, as a means to exercise the brain, to keep the synapses functioning as they should.
On a different note, it just occurred to me that sometimes I torture myself by recollecting things that happened a long time ago. Events that were etched in my memory for some reason and that, later on, I began to analyse properly. I don’t know why I do that, because those events don’t matter anymore. What matters is that I am able to shed new light on them and sometimes I can decide whether I was in the wrong or not. I hurt myself by doing that. The people involved probably won’t even remember what happened then, it’s only me drawing conclusions and feeling hurt in the process. For better or worse I can see those events from a new perspective, different from what I remember. It drives me crazy sometimes, because I get mad at people for treating me the way they did, for not having then a proper response or for reacting badly. It’s just not healthy. Necessary, yes, but unhealthy nevertheless.
I then decided that I am going to put those down in my journal. Every time they decide to poke their ugly heads from the past, I will write them down and deal with them, see if I can flush them, not from my memory entirely - no one wants that - but its relevance. I need closure, I guess. And I think this is not the end of this subject.
Hopefully you will catch up with your journaling and, at some point, stop flushing out the past, when it's all said and dealt with, and start writing down the current things that are occupying your mind. In my experience, this is the moment when that feeling of frustration, of not having said the right thing, doesn't show up as often.