755 Days + 76 More

It’s been 755 days (+76 more) since I last posted something on this blog, when I started it I wanted to post to at least once every fortnight so that I could get used to expressing what was in my head and try to stop overthinking everything. I feel like a lot has changed in that time but also that I’ve just been treading water and nothing has really changed at all…

I originally drafted this post 2.5 months ago whilst on a train between Madrid and Vigo, some of what I’d written was more fully thought out and some of it just bullet points. I’d like it to be an accurate representation of how I felt on 27th April 2023 sitting on that train but I know that what comes next will in some way be coloured by my experiences since then.

Why I didn’t keep it up

I started this blog at a time of big change for myself, I’d spent a lot of time working things out about my feelings and had realised that talking about them more openly was a beneficial thing for me. I was also excited about this new chapter in my life and initially full of energy, I had moved into my dad’s for what I expected to be a 3-6 month project that I could work on at the same time as my own side projects before leaving to go and travel the world indefinitely. After being at my dad’s for a short while I quite quickly realised that there was a lot more that needed fixing than just the bricks and mortar and I began to feel overwhelmed, frustrated, incapable.

I’d started to ‘get into’ tech twitter, I was going to be working on some cool side projects, so it obviously made sense to ‘connect’ with other people online, right?! Not for me, the constant stream of people seemingly successfully working on a million different things at once just made me pile pressure onto myself and I felt like I was achieving nothing. Sorting my dad’s place was also dragging on indefinitely which combined with the general negative energy around the place made me unhappy and the thing I said at the outset I wouldn’t do (only communicate when I’m happy) I ended up doing. My desire to communicate shut down completely, I half drafted a couple of posts about the climate but never got them to a stage I felt I was happy with them and hence we’re now here 755 days later at another point where I’m feeling happy, like I have head space to ponder life and I’m excited for what is about to come.

What I’ve been up to

Although I feel like I’ve just been treading water the past 2 years and not achieving anything I have done quite a bit. In no particular order…

• I kinda finished doing my dad’s house up, there’s a few unfinished bits left but no more than a couple of weeks work. I desperately wanted everything finished but I reached a point where I ‘gave up’, didn’t have the energy to push, encourage, cajole or think any more about the house. I resigned myself to making myself available if my dad ever asked for help to finish the last bits off and therefore also that they would still be sitting there waiting to be done in 30 years’ time or however long he has left before he meets his maker.
• I’ve spent (a lot) of (mostly wasted) time laying in my room on my laptop or watching tv.
• I found someone I care greatly for, that helped recharge me and balance out the negativity I was constantly enveloped in at my dad’s.
• I ’lost’ that person a year later, not in a definitive sense, we’re still friends and I still care for her greatly, but we realised we were on different paths and went our separate ways.
• I did a 3-month solo cycle around Europe passing through The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and Spain.
• I tried getting Italian citizenship via my grandmother only to discover that her date of birth on her Italian birth certificate is 1st May and on all her British paperwork it is the 2nd May meaning that the consulate would automatically reject the application 😥
• I’ve done a couple of work contracts.
• I went away on an incredibly intense, eye opening 3-week bus tour with Extinction Rebellion.
• I spent a lot of time overthinking.
• I started the year by knocking lots of jobs off of my mental to-do list. Jobs that had been hanging around for months or in some cases years, things that had been cluttering up my head and acting as worries or noise. Whilst doing that I tried to simplify as much as possible: pensions and investments, hard drives, tax returns, email providers, server providers, blog software etc…. all the boring stuff. It seems simple but removing the ongoing mental upkeep of things that I’m not actually interested in, fighting my sense of needing to feel like I’m in control of every last thing in my life, thinking that I know better and that I must understand the detail was massively beneficial for me. I’ve successfully cleared some of my usual mental baggage so I can divert more of my thinking cycles to things that do actually matter and it’s noticeable.

And I also learnt some more things about myself…

What I’ve learned

For a short while before I went away on my cycle I had some sessions with a psychologist, there were a few things I wanted to dig into; a feeling of resentment towards my dad, some intimacy issues and trying to gain some more clarity in my thinking around what was next for me. I didn’t gain much insight from the sessions in any of those areas to be honest, but a couple of things did come up:

Being hard on myself

This was first noticed by my ex, I was putting up a blind and did something wrong and my immediate reaction was to say to myself “you fucking dickhead Sean”. She asked why I was always so hard on myself and that she’d noticed I did it a lot. I mentioned it to the psychologist, and we unpacked it a bit without really drawing any conclusions. Although just being aware of it has helped me to notice when I’m doing it and modify my behaviour, which is a good thing.

The most obvious example of this for me was that I’d started playing football on a Thursday night (my psychology sessions were also on a Thursday), anyone that knows me will know that I’m an enthusiastic player but also not very good. So, whenever I invariably hit a bad pass or blazed the ball miles wide of the goal, I would always say sorry to people and give myself a telling off in my head, it’s something I’ve done ever since I was a kid when playing any kind of sport. So fresh from my discussions with the psychologist I just tried stopping myself from doing that internal telling off, stopped saying sorry and changed how I phrased things to other players. For example, “almost” became “great shot”, a very slight change of wording but to me it made the game feel so much more positive, and I had the best game I’d had there by far.

Setting impossible goals

I guess this is kind of linked to being hard on myself, but my psychologist picked up on the fact that nearly all my past, present & future goals were impossible to achieve. That I consciously set myself up to fail and prevent myself from taking any kind of pride in my ‘achievements’ (not sure what they would be). We didn’t get deep enough into the problem to work out why I do that but again being aware of it has been beneficial.

and then there’s the stuff I worked out on my own…

Relationships

Being a healer 😂

Someone called me a healer which I was surprised and humbled by but can also understand in a weird way. I’ve always seen it more that I’m a relatively stable, calm, predictable, boring person and maybe that works for people who have some shit going on in their life at the time. I do like to help people though.

Keeping in contact with people

I’m shit at replying to messages which is something that does worry me as I’d hate to lose relationships because of that, my dad has let relationships with people fall away and now he is in a position where he is lonely and has nobody to talk to and I don’t want to do the same. Invariably whenever I reply to someone I apologise and say I’ve been busy which is bullshit really, it takes no time to reply to someone.

I read a book yesterday called “The courage to be disliked”, its hypothesis is that all problems boil down to interpersonal relationships, I can agree with that and now I’m wondering whether the reason I don’t reply to messages is maybe linked to some kind of fear of getting too close to people. Other people I know are also shit at replying to messages, maybe they suffer from the same thing as me? I do feel that peoples’ energies attract similar energy and I know a lot of other people who feel damaged, maybe they are also scared of getting close to people whether they realise it or not. If you get close to people, you can be hurt. Maybe I’m overanalysing it…

On a similar vein I put zero effort into talking to my brother, niece and nephew as well, my excuse for that is that he doesn’t pick up when I call which is again a shit excuse, maybe I avoid there being a relationship for other reasons and therefore don’t put the effort in like I should would like to.

It’s also the same with calling my nan, I don’t think that will have anything to do with closeness, but I make the excuse that I can’t really have a conversation due to her hearing but that’s not what matters, she will appreciate speaking to me so that’s what matters.

Horizontal relationships

I feel within my group of school mates there is a combative energy, one which I contribute to, sometimes I almost troll them by posting things I know they’ll go against. Having read about horizontal and vertical relationships yesterday I would like to try and make these relationships more horizontal. It will mean me questioning some of my own ego and the feeling that I am in some way more worldly or superior, which if I’m honest in some ways I do feel. That isn’t right, they are my brothers, and I should see them as equals, they are equal.

Being on the other side of emotions

When my ex and I first started seeing each other I felt like I was experiencing something which other exes will have experienced from me in the past. A weird disinterest and withdrawal when we weren’t with each other which didn’t make sense compared with how we were when we were together, she became more distant, less responsive, less engaged.

My younger self did this because I had a lot of fear of being hurt in relationships, of being vulnerable. My more recent self has got awkward when it seems that the other person is more into me than I am into them or I’m just not feeling it anymore and I’ve done the same thing, withdrawn, got more distant etc.

It was really painful to be on the other side of that emotion but also very worthwhile for me to experience how others must have felt at times because of me doing that. For those that I’ve hurt like this I’m sorry and I won’t be doing that in future. You must make sure you’re honest with people even if you think it will hurt them, don’t just go quiet on people when there’s a problem. It ends up hurting them more.

Sex and dating

At the end of 2022 I was dating quite a lot and they were good, fun, ‘successful’ dates. I feel that the more honest I am with myself and the more I learn about who I really am and can talk openly about that with people the easier it seems for me to connect with them. Being able to be open and honest about my sexual desires also feels very liberating. I think your desires are something very tightly woven into who you are as a person (whether you realise that or not) and it feels wonderful to be able to express yourself without worrying about any kind of judgment coming back.

Wanting a family

The feeling of wanting to have a family has come back quite strongly at times. Although I’m conflicted on whether it’s a selfish thing to want to bring a child into this fucked up world.

I’ve said to myself and others that I think life would be ’easier’ if I had a family as my purpose in life would be decided, all that would matter was to fight for my family and look after them and I could therefore throw myself into activism or whatever would best serve their wellbeing.

Is it maybe just another incarnation of not valuing myself or avoiding DOING something because I need X then I can do X rather than just doing X? Avoiding fully committing myself to something because then I can be judged?

Creation vs consumption

Not much to say here but I realised that (at least for me) happiness has a correlation to the ratio of how much I create (in the broadest sense of the term) vs how much I consume. Linked with that I’d say that actively following the news (which is something I tend to slip into doing) has a massive negative effect on my happiness.

I also realised I think I buy new camera gear to stop myself going out and taking photos and subsequently sharing them with the world, that or I don’t actually like photography and just tell myself I do for some weird reason.

Going with the flow

I started 2023 with a clear mantra to go with the flow more, not to put pressure on myself, not to plan too much. It helped me massively and worked well for the first 2.5 months and then I struggled a bit. A few things that I think contributed / coincided:

• I started the year working a full-time work contract, the structure of having a work project every day helped, it removed time that would have been spent thinking what I should be doing or beating myself up for laying on my bed watching tv all morning. Once the core of the build work was done and we were onto testing and tidying the last bits up I found it harder, as it was less concrete in my head what I’d be doing each day.
• I’d also arranged to go away to Portugal for 3 months and maybe because I had committed to something I wanted to be doing I then felt like real work was trapping me in the U.K.
• My dad’s mood also dropped again, he stopped going out for the Nordic walking that he’d taken up, just wanted to stay in and sleep or watch tv again. Living near someone with that energy rubs off on me in a way I wish it didn’t… or maybe that’s just another excuse!

Pressure & self-sabotage

I’ve learnt a few things:

• The word ‘should’ and ‘need’ are bad words when applied to human behaviour, it’s not a law of physics whereby there is an expected outcome. There is no reason why anyone should do anything, only things that someone chooses or wants to do. If there are always things someone ‘should’ or ‘needs’ to be doing then they probably don’t want to do them for whatever reason or have chosen not to prioritise them. That framing has helped me to put less pressure on myself.
• Being publicly digitally accountable does nothing for my motivation or chances of sticking to something.
• I’m not someone who can work at a screen all day and then do much productive (side projects) of an evening. My brain bandwidth just isn’t there anymore, maybe I never had it, but I feel like I used to be able to work all day and night no problem. Maybe I’m just experienced enough now to know that it won’t actually add anything / not worth the downsides of doing that?

Roots

After I got back from my cycle the thought of just travelling indefinitely on my own didn’t appeal anymore, neither did buying some land to live off grid on my own. I’d realised I could be lonely which remarkably isn’t a thought that had entered my head as a possibility.

I do really want to put down roots somewhere again though, just not sure where yet and what form that will take. If I sit here and fantasise right now then my head goes to buying some land with a partner, making a cool off grid project and then having a little family but who knows!

Kind of related to that… the northern Spanish countryside from Barcelona all the way over to where I cycled to Bilbao is very, very pretty, quiet and relaxing. I could definitely see myself living there, it was one of the highlights of my cycle despite it being right at the end and me being a bit mentally broken and just wanting to get home as quickly as possible by then. Also, French and Spanish trains are so much better than English ones.

Things I’ve found hard

At times in these 2 years, I’ve definitely had a battle going on in my head between living a ’normal’ but good life, low impact, kind, caring etc. and letting go of normal completely, going full time activist and living in a tree house or something. That’s still on my mind a lot and I’m not sure when or if I’ll resolve that one way or the other.

Having spent a lot of time with my dad and seeing what loneliness has done to him that’s now my biggest fear. The feeling of not having the necessary tools to fix a problem is something that weighs on me and I’ve very much felt that with my dad, I’ve realised I can’t fix him and that hurts me. I’ve felt this once before in my life and that was with an ex that was suffering the effects of a very traumatic childhood, at the time that broke me. I thought I could fix anything; how stupid I was.

What’s next

In short, I don’t know, I’m on my way to live on a community project in Portugal that is also a YouTube channel. It seems cool, I’m sure I’ll learn some stuff but it’s also not really climate related. After that I’ll try to live each day as it is. Do what seems the right thing at the time, go with the flow… Maybe communal living longer term, maybe find some people to get land with, maybe go headfirst into some activism!

Hopefully I won’t feel like I’m still treading water in another 2 years’ time!

TLDR / Lessons to My Younger Self

• Create more.
• Plan less.
• Don’t be ashamed of who you really are.
• Don’t be so hard on yourself.