It was the second week of June. I had just come back from my New York trip on a high. It was my most epic trip yet. For the rest of the month, I adopted the mantra ‘work hard, play hard’. If I wanted to keep having epic trips, then I needed to keep working hard in order to afford them. So I got very serious when it came to my freelance business and my business goals. I was proud of myself for having weekly meetings, setting goals for myself, and achieving them. This was all in addition to preparing for my dance recital, doing my web design course, and trying to keep up with this blog. I had all these things going for me, and it made me feel really confident and productive. I thought to myself, finally, I’ve gotten serious in life, and I’m finally focused on going after what I want. And then, in July, everything came tumbling down.
Tumbling Down Life’s Hill
Looking back at it now, I could see why I lost momentum, and lost interest in everything else that mattered at the time. There were too many things going on at the same time demanding my attention. I had my dance recital. I had another radio jingle to finish, this time for Heineken Light, which demanded more time than usual because I had to record three people instead of one. I had set high expectations for the website I was building for my freelance business, wanting to make it the most perfect, most elegant, most creative website ever built. And I didn’t know how to do that. And then in the midst of all of that, I had to try to figure out what to write about for the blog. It was just too much on my plate. And then that flame I had inside me went out. I had reached burnt out mode.
In the weeks that followed, I gave up on everything: the blog, the website, and my freelancing and web design goals. I even stopped doing yoga and running: two activities I loved. And I stopped focusing on preparing for the GMAT exam. I just let things slide. And then I grew demotivated as I started spending more time wasting time. The more I wasted time, the more I chided myself for sliding again, and doing what I always do. It felt like I was giving up again, and not making progress on my dreams. All that negative self-talk obviously only made things worse, and made me more resistant to getting back on track, despite wanting to.
The Mental Wall of Fear
Usually, when I’ve stopped doing something for some time, a sense of fear emerges. This mental wall goes up, where the thing I knew how to do that I was good at suddenly becomes this thing that I think I’m no longer good at. Every time I thought about the activities I kept putting off, I was filled with this intense anxiety, panic and exhaustion. It’s only until I manually override that ‘shutdown mechanism’ in my brain that I’m then able to do the things that I’ve been dreading to do.
Breaking Through the Wall
After a while, all of that negative self-talk and fear gets exhausting. At some point, you just have to realise that you’re being ridiculous. Complaining about the problem over and over again and not following through with action won’t help you to get back on track. So today, after complaining to a friend about not wanting to live a mediocre life for the umpteenth time, I finally decided to do something about it. Literally, I just said to myself, “Fuck it, let’s do this,” and amusedly observed my mind’s generator crank back up again.
Observe the Triggers
I will probably always have trouble with staying productive. But I’m starting to be more aware of the triggers. Some of these things include doing way too many activities within the same timeframe, giving myself way too many goals to achieve in a short space of time, and trying to achieve perfection. All of these things cause me to become overwhelmed, and then I shut down and/or get burnt out. It’s my hope that knowing these triggers can help me to mitigate them, thus reducing the risk of being burnt out and then losing time to recover from that feeling, as well as motivating myself to resume the tasks.
Yes, Life is a Hill
This experience reminded me that life will always have ups and downs. We will never stay motivated 100% of the time. And just because we will experience downs in our journey, it doesn’t mean that we’ve tumbled back down to square one. Failures, challenges, obstacles, all of these things that we identify with being negative, are in fact opportunities to help us become our most well-rounded, whole selves. So instead of looking at them as setbacks, maybe I need to start embracing them. They’re proof that I still haven’t figured everything out yet, and there’s still more room for me to grow.
