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Avoidance Tackling, Mindfulness Course

8 months ago771 words

I've been feeling like an embarrassing disappointment lately, so I decided to try to actually do something about it instead of just whining every week...

I often update this blog when I'm feeling down, but when I'm feeling alright, I tend to spend that energy on making things, so these posts present a sort of skewed picture of how well I'm generally doing.

Still, I spent some time looking back through old blog posts this week in search of stuff about Dreamons, and so many of them are just me complaining about the same stuff over and over, which isn't exactly something that fills me with pride. (The number of views has also been steadily going down over time and is at an all-time low.)

The fact is that I'm quite badly impaired by circumstance and mental issues though, and the tangle I'm trapped in isn't simple to escape because of all the things I need to do to get out.

They say you're meant to break down insurmountable tasks into smaller, 'actionable' (ugh) chunks, and I did that a few days ago; looks like I already mentioned it in my previous post, though I also said I found it intimidating and just wanted to avoid everything.

Years ago, I made a tool for myself I could potentially use to get around my maladaptive avoidance coping strategies. It's a minimalistic browser-based thing with a look I personally find appealing, where I can add tasks as columns. At the top of each task column is a text box where I briefly describe my goal, then I can add 'update' comments to that task which are marked with my current (colour-coded) mood. The intention being to add several of those updates before, during, and after the task to compare how my neurotic mind expected I'd feel with how I actually felt. Often I found that I felt much less bad than expected.

I dug that up and dusted it off, and my intention is to use it to tackle these tasks slowly, maybe just one per day. Slow progress is better than no progress, and it lessens the chance of getting overwhelmed and just giving up.

Some are tiny, five-minute jobs that I should have done forever ago and just didn't, so the mere thought of them became poisonous. Others are more substantial, and I'll likely need to spend hours or days working at them. Some don't really have a clear solution (eg 'find employment'; I don't even know what the first steps towards that would look like... though I suppose that'd mean 'do research' would be a first step, hmm).

I'm not expecting massive life changes as a result of this, but at least some tiny steps forward would be something. I've already ticked off a few minor entries, and... well, I can't say I feel any better for doing so, but none of them were that big of a deal. I need to start somewhere, though; establishing a habit is the most important part at this stage.



Also, I get emails from the mental health charity I previously got counselling from, advertising other events they're running. A while back, I got one about a group mindfulness course that ran for several weeks, but it was at the same time as the counselling classes so I couldn't go.

They're running another now, though, and since I'm no longer doing those classes, I can go to this one.

I don't expect much from it. I've been to probably half a dozen mindfulness groups in the past, and they always go pretty much the same way. I was always by far the youngest there, even when the events were hosted in the evening at the university I was attending.

So I'll go with the aim being to just endure the five weeks of the course until the end, rather than to make connections. Maybe it'll rekindle some of the interest in once had - and got a lot of value out of - in mindfulness and the like that'll help me mentally in the long run (probably more than a chance encounter with some potential partner, realistically speaking).



I've also been working away at Dreamons, and I have a lot to say about that, but wanted to get this out and didn't want to write a post about both (since ideally I want to write a thorough 'current state of' post I can pin).

I've updated ∞ my Patreon ∞ with some concept stuff and music for that, though I never know who actually reads the posts there!