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Writing slumps
I am in my slumps of writing. I have clocking around 3-4 times a week for free writing, mindmapping, throwing everything in, randomly creating categories and hoping those categories stay so that I don’t have to rewrite everything.
It’s very hard to say if I am making progress. I have asked my husband if I made progress, he said yes. I read articles about writer’s block and I am following the steps they have given. Free write, take a walk, talk to people and do other things. Once in awhile, some of my knowledge falls into place but most of the time I feel I am just swimming in a mess which I hope to make sense.
I have to go through my supervisors, and most of the time their direct remarks of my work do affect me. While I know this is not personal and it is valid feedback, but after every feedback, I have a lot of emotions to handle. I have to take a few days off just to process my emotions and the comments.
I know, some have told me not to take it personally or be less sensitive. After reading books about high sensitivity and emotionally healthy books, I realised that I have to acknowledge everything I feel, whether it is personal or sensitive. With every acknowledgement of my emotions and feelings, I am able to process better and continue to work.
Everyday, I am disciplining myself to write, even if it is crap.
Loneliness
I have become socially awkward these days. I wish I don’t have to talk to people or trying to talk because I know my statements doesn’t sound normal or funny these days.
Today I saw my ex-colleague send a photo of a few of them hanging out with each other. While it was a meeting between the six of them, I honestly feel left out because I am actually available but was not called. I did think of the worse when I saw that picture, but here are my thoughts at the end:
- I am in this weird phase of life. I have stopped taking in web freelance and even forgetting how to do the web stuff that I used to do. To be honest, I don’t miss my web life. While my earlier years in web was interesting and I was happy, but web have changed significantly and I hate coding.
- In this ultitarian point of view, I have nothing to offer, even for the lame conversations that can make people laugh.
- I shut my emotions openly. I actually freeze and have this standoffish mode to others to the point I can’t say hi. It is not a good body language, but I fear of being discovered that I am not good enough or losing touch with this world.
- I don’t fake my emotions these days. Of course I do will try my best to be patient and be indirectly truthful (as direct truthfulness can be misinterpreted as personal attack), but I have stopped being nice and become less manipulative. While I am sad that certain friendships had moved on, but I also have to remind myself not to manipulate that by asking people to add me back to the group. That’s the reason why I left Facebook and Twitter because I know I can be a passive aggressive person and I don’t need another medium to propagate my negative behaviours.
- I am a highly strung person and I know not many people want to talk to me for the fear of the repercussions of me being crazy emotional at them. I don’t blame them and in my heart I wished that they know I have learnt how to acknowledge my emotions.
Emotional Labour
I think all of us in a certain point of life have dealt with emotional labour. I was reading this article and this part resonates most with me, especially the fakeness that I have to go through:
The brilliance of Grandey’s metaphor is precisely that it’s not gendered. Every adult, regardless of their gender or professional stature, has received a gift they really didn’t like. And as long as you’re not a horrible person, you’ve tried, at least once, to mask that dissatisfaction so as to make your friend or relative feel good about themselves—probably because you genuinely cared about the gift-giver’s happiness and self-confidence.
Nine times out of 10, when you fake positivity upon opening a lame gift, you’re not doing so out of maliciousness, resentment, or a deep-seated conviction that the gift-giver gave you this crap because they think they’re better, smarter, or more worthy than you. You’re doing so because you want to maintain a healthy relationship, and because you feel pressure to be caring.
From this, I can only be grateful to friends and ex-colleagues when they do the emotional labour for me when it was needed. I have done this sometimes too but that thing now is who did it more than the other. The point it, we don’t know acknowledge how much one have to fake it just to maintain friendship. At least at this point, if we are all honest about it, then it is easier for us to move on.