Existential FOMO
There's a few things about myself that I haven't come to terms with, and maybe never will. I'm sitting here, flush in unemployment and what you'd imagine to be buckets of empty time, with the creeping sensation of drowning. How the hell can an introverted person like me have such an insane schedule, especially when I'm not working? Am I camouflaging my true nature, or am I a self saboteur?
There's competing messages in my brain almost always; I am a sensitive, paradoxical mess. I want my days to be lazy, slow days of introspection, spirituality, self-connection, and learning, but they end up metastasizing into a smorgasbord of volunteering, activities with friends, projects, activism, until I have to trick myself into allowing the quiet moments.
The thing that keeps me so unwillingly busy is the undeniable fact of life's transitory nature. We are here and then gone; our moments spent around our loves grow shorter by the day. We have less and less time to spend loving on people, or working towards a more just world. In moments of sheer overwhelmedness, Buddhist ideas can sometimes work for me but other times they can make me even more anxious about "living my life correctly/fully/best". The smallest decisions that come my way end up feeling bloated with meaning and potential regret: should I really go out tonight? If I choose reading this book over engaging in this action, what does that say about me?
Writing is a way of engaging with this anxiety of existential FOMO + not enough-ness and also helps me slow time down. Because part of this anxiety finds its source in perfectionism and how it shades all of my decisions, the worry is that any writing will also fall prey to its sharpened claws. In that spirit, I'm trying to care a whole lot less about making my writing 'great' (whatever that means) and simply just writing---I spend so much time internally editing how I express myself until there's barely anything left to express---so, it's hugely important for me to accept my blunders, my run-on sentences, my bold ideas in all their human-ness. It's enough.
There's competing messages in my brain almost always; I am a sensitive, paradoxical mess. I want my days to be lazy, slow days of introspection, spirituality, self-connection, and learning, but they end up metastasizing into a smorgasbord of volunteering, activities with friends, projects, activism, until I have to trick myself into allowing the quiet moments.
The thing that keeps me so unwillingly busy is the undeniable fact of life's transitory nature. We are here and then gone; our moments spent around our loves grow shorter by the day. We have less and less time to spend loving on people, or working towards a more just world. In moments of sheer overwhelmedness, Buddhist ideas can sometimes work for me but other times they can make me even more anxious about "living my life correctly/fully/best". The smallest decisions that come my way end up feeling bloated with meaning and potential regret: should I really go out tonight? If I choose reading this book over engaging in this action, what does that say about me?
Writing is a way of engaging with this anxiety of existential FOMO + not enough-ness and also helps me slow time down. Because part of this anxiety finds its source in perfectionism and how it shades all of my decisions, the worry is that any writing will also fall prey to its sharpened claws. In that spirit, I'm trying to care a whole lot less about making my writing 'great' (whatever that means) and simply just writing---I spend so much time internally editing how I express myself until there's barely anything left to express---so, it's hugely important for me to accept my blunders, my run-on sentences, my bold ideas in all their human-ness. It's enough.
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