So it’s 7 January and I know a lot of people will be only a week into New Year’s resolutions right now and so hopefully you won’t quite yet have lost enthusiasm with those, but for me Christmas and New Year came at a bit of an inconvenient time as I was slap bang in the middle of a massive decluttering effort and trying to start this blog.
I’d been motoring along since mid November with tons of enthusiasm and energy, but my efforts had been held up a little already by a sudden influx of work. I also wanted to do things right so I was carefully working my way through ProBlogger’s Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course and taking it all very carefully and stopping myself from doing my usual thing of jumping straight in. With my decluttering I was following the Konmari method but had also discovered a couple of extreme minimalists on YouTube who were inspiring me to go even further than just making my house a bit easier to clean.
I’d given up TV, which weirdly, as I wrote about in this post, hadn’t given me any more time seemingly, but just an ever-increasing to do list. And I’d developed this inability to relax and rest and sit down so I was just full-on busying about getting stuff done.
Then Christmas hit, and New Year’s followed, and I end up staying at my parents’ house for most of that period, with the result that when I came home I’d rediscovered the joys of TV, jigsaws, sugar, alcohol, and sleep.
I’ve been back home about five days now and I’m still struggling to get back into a routine that works. I’m getting my freelance work done. I’m just about getting my exercise done, although icy weather is scuppering my running somewhat. I’m cooking healthy meals, avoiding alcohol and sugar, and have now managed almost three days without TV.
But my efforts at both this blog and decluttering have completely stalled. I seem to run out of time and energy each day before I get to them. But more importantly, I don’t have the same certainty, enthusiasm, or sense of urgency about either of them.
Technically, I still really want to be a(n extreme) minimalist. But when I actually start trying to act on it I feel sluggish, it feels hard, I don’t feel sure about what I should do, and I’m beginning to question why it even felt important to me in the first place.
In terms of this blog, I just don’t know what to write about any more and I have no confidence in what I AM writing.
But with both of these things, it doesn’t actually feel like it’s a motivation or confidence or even a certainty thing. I feel foggy. I feel tired before I’ve even begun. I feel “floopy”, to use a phrase coined by Phoebe in Friends, which I’ve taken to mean that feeling of not being quite able to use your limbs or think straight. It’s all just too hard and I keep changing my mind before I’ve even begun to do anything.
So…to go back to the title of this post, what am I going to do about it? Well, I’m just going to start with something small and simple, from where I am right now, and take the smallest possible step I can take. And then I’m going to try to take another one. In other words, I’m going to put any thoughts of where I’m trying to get to or why out of my mind, for now, and just take some action. That might not ALWAYS be the right thing to do. It’s definitely a good idea to know where you’re aiming for and why, but I already did that work back in November, and I’m pretty sure those reasons will still hold true. I think the problem right now is that I’ve got out of the habit of taking regular action and I’m suffering from inertia/procrastination/self-doubt. So I’m just going to take all the emotion out of the equation, just for now, and do the stuff. Write the post, publish the post, declutter one drawer, take one box of paper out to the recycling.
And that’s it for now.