Somewhere in the past two weeks, I hit the extreme overwhelm point…

I’m not exactly sure when (I feel like my perception of time is skewed), but I remember reading Sarah’s We Used to Speak in Essays and then watching Aubrey’s most recent vlog about her thoughts about blogging, social networking, online communication, etc. and I just went into internal meltdown mode.

My thoughts were already focused on blogging and social media… I just launched the website for a business that’s pointedly focused on such matters and my brain was already focused on deconstructing the practice for blog entries about it…

But when Sarah helped drag up memories of the past and Aubrey brought up some of the consequences… I found my head started screaming, “I want the world to stop!” and in an exercise of futility, covered my own ears.

That doesn’t work when your own mind is the one doing all the screaming.

There was one night… early morning, actually… somewhere around 4 or 5 AM where I realized that I’d been spending the past three hours refreshing Facebook, Twitter, Bloglovin’ and whatever else over and over and over in a loop, just waiting for something new to come in… and at that time of morning, very little actually does. I kept opening up my IM clients and looking at the lists of names…. trying to figure out if there was someone around who I could talk to. At that hour, most of the world is still asleep.

I realized that this is a pattern. The wasting time waiting for something that doesn’t come… The desperate longing for connections that may not even be there.

I did something that seemed almost revolutionary to me.

I shut the computer, and tucked it into my desk on the keyboard drawer.

I pulled out my journal and wrote down my thoughts.

I pulled out books and read (or in some cases my tablet…)

I made up a new rule for myself… If I ever found myself just aimlessly surfing the web for no reason, that was the cue to put away the computer and go do something else.

So far, so good.

It doesn’t solve some problems though. Like, the whole money thing… I have my share of the rent to contribute. I have debts that I need money to pay off.

Personal discovery, unfortunately, doesn’t pay the bills… Unless you manage to write a book or cut an album or something, and even then the pay off isn’t immediate or even guaranteed.

I’m strongly considering inquiring about the dev jobs I keep getting contacted about despite the fact that my body bristles at the thought.

I created a page on my business website that details what I do this week. Do you know someone who needs someone like me? (Maybe you do?) Pass it along, please. I need your help these days.

How are you doing these days?

I took that picture of the George Washington Bridge from the lookout that’s in Jay Hood Wright Park this evening. I was feeling cooped up in the house and strongly desiring a Philly Cheese Steak and I told myself that I’d let myself have one if I just went and took a walk around.

I get into these funks where I just sit in front of the computer and then don’t leave the house for days… or if I do leave the house, it’s only to go to the same old places… The grocery store. The yoga studio. The bodega… Which I’ve come to decide doesn’t really count as leaving the house because those trips are so routine.

Not that taking a walk to the park was far out of my typical route… but it’s certainly a place I don’t go with any stunning regularity.

It wasn’t a long walk, it’s still colder than I like here in the city… and the wind didn’t really encourage me to be outside any longer than I have to, but I decided that I needed to just go do that because I just needed to move around some stagnant energy.

Stagnant. I think that’s the word that really best describes where I’m at these days.

I haven’t wanted to come right out and say that because… ehhhhh… It’s not exactly easy to admit that you’re struggling to the greater world.

Shawna, one of my yoga teachers, posted a link to a short TED talk by Derek Silvers called Keep Your Goals To Yourself up on Facebook yesterday which got me thinking. It’s talking about how we’re less likely to achieve our goals if we announce them to the world because when we receive all those pats on the back for what we want to do, we end up tricking our brain into thinking that we’ve already done it because we’ve gotten all that premature praise.

While I don’t think that’s always the case, I definitely felt the sentiment resonating with me in regards to my own goals and business plans. I floated out a bunch of goals a month ago that I’ve yet to come through on and every time I think about actually sitting down and you know…. doing something about it… I’m met with that pit of dread in my stomach.

It’s not that I wish that I hadn’t shared, I certainly felt like I needed to at the time… but I’ve been having a hell of a time getting back up on the horse after a cold and the death of my grandfather seemingly kicked me off of it.

I feel like I’m in a tender spot right now. My emotions are raw. I feel like I’m clinging hard to home and leaning on the people who live with me. Some days, just trying to stay with my breath is the best that I can do.

I also find myself in a place where I’m doing a lot of spiritual exploration. I’ve spent days reading about spiritual abuse recently. I’ve been digging into my yoga practice. I’ve been reading Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self by Anodea Judith which as you might guess from the title corrleates Western psychology to the the chakra system. I bought a tarot deck and am teaching myself to read cards.

I have hope that better days are up ahead and that these stagnant anxious feelings that’s been washing over me the past couple of weeks will recede. It’s just that for now… I just need to lean into the discomfort of where I’m at and just remember to keep breathing and keep on keeping on.

How have you been lately?

Linking up with Word Vomit Wednesday:

(Yeah, I know it’s Thursday…)

Someone along the way dropped the ball and failed to mention, “Oh yeah, and by the time you turn 25… You’ll be sporting a faint light brown mustache and start growing random hairs on either side of your chin that are as course as man beard. This hair will be the bane of your existence, and you’ll spend hours of your day fretting about your facial hair.”

It’s one of those things that women don’t really talk about. It’s just sort of assumed that if you have it, you’ll figure out how to get rid of it.

I’ve tried a lot of things to tame the facial hair…

Going to the salon and getting it all waxed off was the most effective, but I’m a cheap bastard and dropping cash to have a lady take five minutes to rip off the hair off of my face wasn’t exactly my idea of money well spent.

I tried the drugstore at home wax strips, but those tended to not pull out any hair and just make my face all sticky.

Hair removal cream worked okay for the mustache despite some redness, but it would leave me with a chemical burn on my chin while the hair remained.

In the end, I mostly just resigned myself to rip out the darkest of the hairs on my chin with tweezers… Not the most effective method, but it got the job done… Tweezers don’t really work for the sensitive upper lip, though. Not unless you like torture. Laziness sort of took over and I just sort of hoped no one would notice the mustache.

Every now and then, I’d get to googling rates for electrolysis and poking around Amazon to convince myself that maybe I could buy one of those at home electrolysis devices and then talk myself out of it after seeing the $300 price tag.

Well.. Last week, I did that again… in on my search on Amazon popped up a $15 device that I’d never seen before.

A hair removal spring.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. A spring with metal (or plastic) caps on each side to use as handles.

You bend it in an upside down U shape and roll both ends inward up against your face and it grabs all the little hairs and rips them out at the root.

It’s so simple that it’s fucking brilliant.

I ordered one and it arrived today… and I’m seriously so in love with the thing that after I ripped all my facial hair out, I had to run right over to my blog and tell all of you ladies with facial hair to go do yourself a favor and buy one of these because it’s going to be your new best friend.

Admittedly, it’s not painless.

When I took it to my upper lip, it stung a little bit. It caused me to sneeze and my eyes to tear up, but it’s in no way unbearable. It feels a lot like the way it feels when you wax and rip the hair out that way, it just takes probably a dozen more passes than a wax does.

My chin is a lot less sensitive so I didn’t find that to hurt at all.

I had my whole face done in under the amount of time I’d spend pulling out all the dark hairs individually.

I ended up picking the R.E.M. Spring Facial Hair Remover, though there’s about fifty billion different makes and models on Amazon that pretty much look all the same to me.

But yeah… this thing is my new best friend. If facial hair is the bane of your womanly existence too… Get yourself a spring. Totally worth the $15.

Back in December, I participated in Stratejoy‘s Holiday Council and one of the things that we were asked to do within the course was to set a theme for the year. After brief meditation, the phrase that popped into my head was Creative Bravery.

Around the beginning of January, I decided to join up with Flock, a relig-ish community run by Rachelle Mee Chapman and one of the first practices she set forth was choosing a guiding star word for the year. My meditation around that yielded me the word Discovery.

Shortly after choosing a theme AND a guiding star word for the year, they kind of went underground into my subconscious. I didn’t do any artwork around them (though it had been suggested). I didn’t write them in a prominent place to keep me focused. I just floated the intentions out there and then forgot about it.

Except for at the same time, I didn’t forget about it because when I look back on the past two months I definitely have been doing a lot of things with the intent on discovering what I want out of this life and there has been creative baby-stepping behind the screen.

Two months into the year, I evaluate things as going well in regards to living towards my intentions.

I’m currently working on my vision of where I want to take my freelancing business and I’m working on the website for it. I’ve got a creative project in discussion with a friend and hopefully soon that will be in action. I’ve been intentionally quiet about the specifics of these things, and probably will be for a bit longer… but soon.

It’s not been easy. One minute I feel excited and full of confidence and the next I wonder, “Who am I to think I can do any of this?” and find myself lying on the living room crying. I’m taking it one day at a time, and at my own pace. Every little step is a brave one. Even the ones that happen behind closed doors.

Whenever my life allows me to create my own schedule, my bed time shifts to sunrise and you’ve got to tempt me with something super awesome to get me out of bed before noon.

It was a bitch to write that sentence.

I really want to turn around and erase it right now and not make that a published admission… but I’m not gonna. Shut up, inner critic.

The reality of the situation is I really love my sleep schedule.

I love everything’s so quiet and peaceful late at night.

I love the fact that I can actually get things done in the middle of the night without getting distracted by social media and blogs because there’s very little new content from the people I follow because… You guessed it, they’re sleeping!

I love the little late night chats I get to catch with my kindred night owls that I always feel so much more present and open during.

What I don’t love is the false assumptions and judgement that comes with bucking the system.

I’ve come to dread telling anyone what my sleep schedule is because I don’t know how many times I’ve admitted my sleep schedule to someone and the immediate response has been, “Oh no! That must be awful!”

I feel like I’m constantly put on the spot to defend the fact that I do indeed enjoy the way I live my life.

A lot of people initially assume that I’m awake at night because I have insomnia, I don’t. I sleep just fine, I just sleep during the day instead of at night.

I have occasionally wondered if I might not fit the bill for delayed sleep phase disorder… I’ve never been officially diagnosed, nor do I particularly feel the need… but I do seem to have a lot of trouble getting my sleep schedule to budge in a direction that makes me a useful human being during the morning. If I need to be somewhere much before noontime, it generally means I’m running on 4 hours of sleep or less. This is likely why day jobs and me don’t really mesh well for the long term.

If that were the case, it’d surely explain a lot.

The inner critic is a tough one to deal with, too.

It’s a really big struggle to not immediately tell myself things like, “Oh my god! You woke up at 2pm?! You’re so lazy!” upon waking. It’s a load of bullshit because it’s not like I do nothing when I stay up all night. I could have had a crazy productive night the night before and I’d still wake up the next morning and tell myself this.

Why do I do this? The whole comparison thing. When I roll out of bed at two, and the the rest of the world has been at it since six o’clock in the morning, I’m running a full eight hours behind everyone else in my time zone. It’s hard not to think, “Oh my god, look what everyone else has accomplished today and I haven’t even gotten out of my pajamas yet!”

I’ve been slowly coming to the realization that this is a part of my reality that it’s wiser to embrace as one of my idiosyncratic quirks and just roll with it. I’m tired of being made to feel that I should be ashamed of this odd ball sleep schedule of mine, and as I’m coming into a phase of my life where I’m redefining what I want to do with my life… This is a serious consideration in it.

I love my the way my brain and body work as is. If I can adapt, why should I feel the need to change it?

Now… If you’ll excuse me, I need to go to bed. It’s nearly 6 o’clock in the morning.

If you were to hack into my feed reader and take a browse around of all the blogs I read, you’d find some incredibly positive blogs… Blogs abound mindful intention and gratitude, blogs about body acceptance, blogs about sex positivity, blogs about inspiration. Blogs about self-love, worthiness and connection.

A lot of sunshine and unicorn farts, essentially.

Yet, in spite of the fact that these are the sorts of things that I enjoy reading and enrich my life… I’ve been noticing that when I sit down to write myself, the sort of things that come off my fingers are generally on the opposite side of the spectrum of positive.

There’s a lot of can’ts. A whole host of so and so did me wrongs and a whole lot of I’m so different, feel so sorry for little old me.

It’s one big ol’ pity party up in my head.

I’ve been feeling a little caught up in that lately. It’s left me questioning what exactly I should put out to the world and what I should hold back for just me. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down recently and went to type up a blog entry and just had it be a string of self-deprecation. I’ve gotten part way through writing something and just been like, “Ehhh… I don’t think anyone really needs to read that.”

One of the disadvantages to the blogging medium sometimes is the fact that you have to keep posting to keep in touch with your audience, and well.. I like you people who comment on my blog and stuff, and I don’t want to just sit here wallowing in my self pity and not posting anything… That’s kinda lame.

I find it’s this odd balance at times… Positive and negative.

I try to focus on the positive… being grateful for things, enjoying every sandwich… and then I end up getting swept up in all of the things that I dislike about my current situation or recounting in excruciating detail situations that happened many many years ago that I’m still not fully over.

So, I ask you dear readers… How do you strike that balance? Are you a more positive or negative person?

My days… or more accurately, my nights… are full of soul work these days.

I spend most of my time writing and thinking.

And checking Facebook.

And wandering around the house aimlessly while talking to myself.

I won’t lie. It’s some rough work.

I’m taking a few guided self-discovery classes online to help with the process. I jumped at the opportunity to take an guided online experience of The Iconic Self by Jen Lee and Phyllis Mathis. Next week I’ll be starting Home is a Hard Lesson, Part 2 with Amanda Page. I didn’t take part one, but it seemed relevant enough to my needs to jump in with midstream.

I’ve been dragging up memories left and right.. and some of it’s not a pretty sight.

It’s kinda like opening an old lunch box and finding moldy bologna, and then berating yourself for not taking care of it sooner.

I’ve been using 750words to jot down the things I’m thinking.

Filling it up with stories about how angry I still am at my high school music teacher who died ten years ago.

Filling it up with thoughts about growing up with social anxiety.

How things that happened then relate to things happening now, and how they don’t, too.

Notes about things I’d like to happen.

I write about anything these days.

It’s just that most of it isn’t for mass consumption. Most of it isn’t even for limited consumption either.

I shared something I wrote with a friend on the subject of fear and the minute I hit the submit button had to curl up into bed and just let myself sink into the abject terror that one simple act of vulnerability seems elicit from me.

And it passed, and I feel better for having done it, even though many hours later I realized that there were more direct, more mentally stable ways of trying to say what I wanted to say. But at the same time, I’m not regretful of what I said… it was just a little like serving someone bathtub gin when they deserved to have Hendricks.

I’m exploring the things I might like to do in the future, trying things on in my imagination to see how they fit.

I have lots of ideas for the future.

I even have a real project in motion. Sorry to be vague, but I’ll announce it to the masses when I’m ready.

I’m learning how to trust people, how to collaborate, and how to not be a moody asshole all the time.

I should have been doing more yoga the past couple of weeks… It makes me feel better when things get shitty. Now I know it’s better not to skip it.

I’m realizing that I beat myself up pretty senselessly.

I have written drafts of several angsty paragraphs about how worthless I feel about the fact that 7AM is my bedtime and 2PM is my wake-up time, and how shamed I feel whenever I admit that to someone and they do that little judgy clicking thing with their tongue and say something like, “Oh, that’s rough…” and I have to resist the urge to get upset because when I’m really honest about it? The only thing I dislike about my sleep schedule is the fact that people seem to think it’s something to pity for and assume I must not be sleeping well.

Bullshit. I’ve been sleeping better than I’ve slept in months. That whole having to be awake to be somewhere by 10AM thing? That’s what causes me to lose sleep. Yet.. Somehow, nobody’s giving me the pity party then, they just tell me I’m being a responsible adult.

Thankfully, I have a roommate that comes home in the middle of the night to remind me that he sleeps the same schedule, and that makes me feel a lot better.

I’ve wasted hours of my life beating myself up because what I’m doing with my life right now probably could be construed as selfish, worthless, and waste of fucking time by some.

But you know what?

It’s working for me right now, and this period of productivity that only I can see will pass, and I’m going to be better for it.

And for me, that’s what makes all the fucking difference.