Returning to Old Habits
Originally I thought to title this "A Really Big Furnace" or "Rekindling the Flame" or some metaphorical representation of what the meaning of the entry is, but I've been doing that a lot and I've started to feel like I'm being a bit pretentious pushing these big fancy metaphors as titles rather than plainly stating what exactly you're getting into with each article.
Titles aside, I've been feeling great recently despite a discernable drop in how much I'm sleeping; it's a problem that comes with the territory that is "doing better" ironically.
I had a lot of things going on both internally and externally recently, but having made it past these things (or at least an appreciable step closer to being through) has been something relatively similar to the end of an arc in a story: I feel unforced to continue trudging along the direction I set off to in the beginning, because there is no more "trudging"; I did the thing.
So I've gravitated to slowly rekindling the fires of old habits. It's amazing how you gain a much more natural ability to focus or do things that you once struggled with when adequate time is spent treating underlying problems.
Go fuckin' figure.
But yeah, doing well against depression, etc etc = productivity that doesn't burn my energy on a logarithmically increasing scale for every minute I continue.
Who needs willpower, right? Discipline, anyone? (Once again I'll allude to some future writing where I get into my stance on those, but to be brief: they suck. Hate them things, I really do.)
And so, when I'm both not entirely energy-less and burned out on a grander scale, I do things. Tonight's thing in particular was playing games in Japanese.
Visions of Mana is the newest entry in the long-running Mana series ("Seiken Densetsu" in Japanese), known most widely for the entry "Secret of Mana" for the SNES. They're great games, and I've been playing them since I could play video games. It filled me with a childlike glee when they had a new entry lined up, and even more so when I found the demo.
But then we come back to energy; I didn't have the energy at the time. Not even enough to play it, let alone in Japanese.
Here I am, though. I survived. And in doing that I put everything into Nihongo and totally jouzu'ed out (I spent nearly an hour in the first 10 minutes of the game).
The biggest difference from burning energy and feeling good? Ambiguity.
One hundred percent, the biggest difference it makes is your ability to tolerate ambiguity, or at least it does for me. To rationalize it, I'd wager it's because I'm prone to perfectionism; if I'm low on energy I don't realize I'm doing it, and thusly never snap out of it. It then becomes an ouroboros of negativity, lending to the logarithm of energy death.
Who cares what I didn't catch? I got the idea, and I'm playing in a pretty foreign language for English speakers to learn. That's enough, surely.
Right?
Yup.
I had fun, genuinely. Even seeing kanji I couldn't even guess the reading of, and the odd word I didn't catch the pronunciation of very well, it was all genuinely a good time. I managed to conquer the perfectionism demon tonight, and that's a huge win for me.
All that's left is to do it again.
Am I worried? Maybe. I don't know if worried is the right word. I'm looking to this experience as proof to myself that if I build up my foundation and correct the problems deeper beneath the surface, I can maybe create an ouroboros, except this time, a positive one:
Attempt, have fun, make progress, repeat.
That's the recipe for success if I've ever seen it.
I think the majour point of this post was just to be able to say:
"You may lose sight of what's fun now, you may have a hard time acting at all, but the effort put into a stronger foundation will surely reward future you with more consistent results, rather than weather the sporadic sessions of current."
Even if you do nothing of your hobbies, focusing on the deepest bits of yourself is worthwhile. Invest in yourself. Delayed gratification is powerful.
Now, back to diving headfirst into new challenges!
Later, netizen.
== Fuza