Up till now I’ve been writing this blog about a day ahead. Yesterday I didn’t have time to write as I had an extremely busy day at work that ate my lunch and had me coming home a little late. My ‘normal’ pattern at this point would be to feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that I ‘could’ miss a day and use this discomfort as a reason to avoid doing any writing ‘just yet’. Near the end of the day I would realise that after all of that procrastination my goal had become impossible and I would give up, probably telling myself that I would just a skip a day. But tomorrow would repeat the same process, and after two or three days I would become so uncomfortable admitting to myself that I hadn’t kept my personal commitment that I wouldn’t write anything in my blog for a year (and all other projects would take about a week off of doing any work).
This doesn’t seem like a particularly good pattern to me, though I can clearly see why I make each of the decisions at each of the steps; I see what creates the pattern. Seeing this unfortunately doesn’t fix the pattern. I can’t just say “Oh, well I’m not going to do that then.” I still feel uncomfortable and my temptation is still to procrastinate. Only now, what I’m procrastinating on is ‘fixing the pattern’ instead of the generic ‘doing what I should be doing’. I’m aware of lots of patterns in my life that I would like to change, but they are still patterns because they are hard to change. I have, in the past, found patterns in my life which were relatively easy to change once I became aware of them. I quickly weeded those out. Now I’m only left with the strong ones (and the ones really good at camouflage; I’ve no idea what or where they are).
In my experience, the best way to fight against a strongly entrenched behavioural pattern is to find another pattern that I already have that I can use against it. I think I’ve just found the pattern I can use in this case, and it’s a weird one to use as a weapon. It’s a modification of another entrenched pattern. I’m using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ modified by ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. I never thought I would use the first one again.
The last time I consciously used ‘making myself upset over nothing’ was during a ‘get to know one another by talking about life problems’ group at a community I was visiting. ‘Making myself upset over nothing’ is a pattern wherein some little discomfort is closely felt and as one gets into this feeling one continuously picks up on new discomforts to tie into the first one until this ball of associated discomforts becomes too much to bear. At times logic will jump in with various facts that show that there is no reason to be upset. These must be ignored. Eventually I become an emotionally wreck incapable of any action (though I’m not taking this pattern that far today). During the ‘talk about life problems social gathering’ this technique garnered me lots of tearful hugs when my turn came around (because I claimed no-one liked me, which I really believed by that point) and a general feeling of bonding. But, as I slowly learnt over the next several months, it also made several people think that I was insane in a bad way.
Worse, whenever a pattern is used, whether consciously or unconsciously, it becomes easier to use again in the future – unconsciously as well as consciously. So for the next year I kept falling into the ‘nobody likes me’ trap, and for the next decade I’ve occasionally fallen into ‘making myself upset over nothing’, gathering a ball of mostly unrelated feelings and combining them into an inescapable trap. That’s why I decided to never use ‘making myself upset over nothing’ again if I could help it.
However, in the last few years I’ve also found the secret exit from ‘making myself upset over nothing’. Once, when drunk, I decided to try programming and discovered I was unable. This upset me, so I decided to try writing instead. While the results of that writing are incoherent, at the time I was writing I didn’t notice and a good time. However, as I didn’t have anything to write about, I wrote about feeling upset about not being able to program. The results, as I say, were not worthwhile in themselves. But they still set an interesting precedent. When I’m upset about something, I can sort through the mess of emotions by writing about them. This process clears things in my head such that I no longer feel upset. It detangles the ball of unrelated emotions so that I can see clearly. I’m still uncomfortable about a bunch of things, but not to the extent that I can’t go on with my life.
This isn’t an ingrained pattern yet. I still often forget about the pattern. But each time I use it the possibility of its use is reinforced. For this reason I am doubly happy to use it in this context. By using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ mutated into ‘writing a close examination of current annoyances’ I am helping myself escape from future tangled balls of feeling through ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. And, at the same time, I am not going the easy route of procrastinating until I give up. Instead I am writing my feelings down now because I’ve made myself face them and feel really uncomfortable, and the easiest path is no longer to put off feeling them but to make them stop by writing them down.
And now that I’ve written them down, I see I’ve actually got a triple win. Not only have I set a future precedent, not only have I sorted those feelings out, but I’ve also written a blog entry for today, so I no longer even have a reason to feel those feelings of discomfort!
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