Long Days

I have too much time. Yes, I try to keep busy; I work on job applications; I tutor; I (gasp! haha) cook; I play the violin; I make art; I read; I walk; I spend a lot of time with friends....but at the end of it all, I just have too much time. Some days stretch on and on and on....I ache when I try to think of how to fill the hours. Even after spending several hours on job applications, there are just so many hours left in a day! Dreadful, empty hours.

I used to watch a lot of TV to distract myself, but I've reached a point where it is so painful to watch TV that I'm actually beginning to break the habit.

The actual problem is not time, because when I've been employed in the past I still felt like this...all too empty at the end of the work day, beginning to dread the task of filling the evening hours. I remember nights where I felt so desperate that I actually looked forward to being at a job I hated just to escape the unbearable limbo. In this emotional state, motivation becomes a real struggle. I lose my motivation because I have such a hard time imagining myself deriving real satisfaction from any particular activity I could pick up. Often, of course, after I finally actually do something, I do feel better. Not always, though, a fact which I am all too quick to remember the next time around. My depression-brain oft repeats this chorus: "No matter what you do, you cannot ultimately escape the emptiness." Boy does that sound cheesy, but no one ever said depression-brain-voices were profound, lol. This fear, that nothing I do will actually make me feel better, paralyzes me. When I get too deep into that fear--when I lose hope that things could actually improve--I lose my motivation.

Hell, I know I'm a week late on this blog post, and I've had ideas to write about for a while. It took me this long to finally say, Kate, you have to do something, writing does actually make you feel good; go work on your blog. Or rather, I've been saying that all along; it took me this long to actually heed my own advice and take the steps of opening a window and starting to type. I literally have had my blog page open for many hours almost every day of the past week with the intention of writing.

It's a crazy thing, motivation. Growing up I had such a good handle on it. I did my homework, practiced my violin because the thought of not doing it, and of receiving dissaproval from a teacher or a bad grade, was so unbearable (brought up such intense guilt) I wouldn't even let it cross my mind. I enjoyed the work too, definitely; I often had the thought that I was grateful I was being assigned to do certain things because I really enjoyed them but couldn't imagine finding the motivation to do them if there weren't an external impetus.

This system of motivation began to unravel when I got to college; when I began to realize that no amoung--NO amount!--of approval from others would ever actually make me feel better about myself. Somehow I kept it together enough to graduate with a strong academic record--I think perhaps the specter of a bad grade was still just enough to keep me from falling off the edge.

How messed up is that! I didn't do the work for the joy of it--even though I found joy in it! I could only force myself to work with an immediate deadline hanging over my head, even though I knew that working made me feel better and not working made me feel worse.

Somewhere along the path of my life some wires in my head got majorly crossed, and I came to believe that anything under the label of "work" was undesirable and anything not under the label of "work" was desirable. Thus have I spent so many hours of my life miserably watching TV instead of doing things that took just a little more effort (thus earning the title of "work") but which would bring so much more satisfaction.

I see this picture so clearly, and it seems so obvious what I could do about it; spend less time with screens, more time with books, writing, music, art, outdoors. But any grand plan brings terror for me because I have made SO many resolutions in my life that I have not kept, and I dread another "failure." And the idea of increasing the "evidence" of how little control I seem to have over myself is...again, terrifying.

A compromise then? I read something in a cognitive therapy book about keeping track of how different activities make you feel; so I will make the very modest commitment of keeping a log of how different activities make me feel. Perhaps I will gather enough evidence to convince my depression-brain that I can actually find some sort of satisfaction out of doing? We shall see.

Activity: Writing
Feeling: After feeling empty and hopeless all day, I finally feel *something*, some sort of vitality that was lacking before. Mmmmm, thank goodness. :)