Lights out Alice!
As was expected, my words are stronger than my will or my actions. I used to claim that I will be okay, whatever the situation. No, I didn't mean that I would not struggle, be broken or feel vulnerable, but there was that underlying belief that I will make it through the day, regardless of the severity of the situation.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe that I will get through this. The difference right now is that the pieces of routine and the SOPs that I had created in my head to prepare myself for this exact situation has now been torn to shreds. I don't mind rebuilding, hopefully I build better, but it is okay if I build worse as well, since the fact that I could rebuild myself would be good enough for me.
This feeling reminds me of when I go running. Everyday, even though I have been running for a while now, I go through the same emotion at the start of the run. It is one of the reasons I keep coming back to running. Doesn't matter that I have ran over a 100 5k runs at this point, the start is still difficult. It still requires a certain level of mental preparation and goading to get on with the job. I don't know if it is the same for others, but at the start, I still don't believe I can make it. If I start with the thought that I have to cover 5000 metres, I immediately get overwhelmed and run worse and might even not make it. If I forget about the end or the complete task at hand and just focus on one part, say the first stretch of 400 metres, focus on my breathing and get it in a good place, get into a rhythm, make sure my steps are in the right place, a place where I am not over-exerting, then I can get through it better. If I think of pushing and how much I need to push, again I get overwhelmed and I fail at reaching the target. If I turn it into segments in which I will push followed by segments in which I will focus on recovery while running slower than usual, all the while listening to my body clearly and being on the lookout for any indicators, I will run better.
This can be extrapolated to give an insight into my psyche. I am a person who fails to perform in the spotlight because he has chosen to shun the light for far too long. I am a person who takes it one step at a time and the enormity of any task, when looked at from an end to end perspective, can throw me out of gear and get me off my game. I get too focused on the outcome and what all I need to do to get to it, any slight inconvenience or deviation, real or imaginary, gets exponentially compounded in my head, all my focus and energy gets directed on figuring out the impact of the deviation, the different scenarios that need to happen to get me back on track and how it needs to play out. If writing this process scenario, which to be honest is an abbreviated form of the entire process that plays out in my head, is already this tiring and cumbersome, imagine my head after this. All this is being done in under 5 seconds, after which the greatest hits (read the worst case scenario) gets played in a loop over and over again. Remember it started with me running. No, right. Exactly, why running gets affected. This is a small sample of how my overthinking brain works. I would like to tell you that this was the worst level but this is barely more than the mean of the intensity curve, if that.
If my scatterbrain ever comes back to this, which I know it will never, given that by definition I don't linger on thoughts but rather jump to and fro not unlike a bee, buzzing away and never staying still long enough to actually make something valuable of my thoughts, UNLIKE a bee. I am just a big pile of hot gas, nothing of tangible value. The point I was trying to make was that I am super in awe of the ability of Vihang to visualize everything in a visual form, be it a graph or a 2 by 2 matrix. I really hope I work towards it and integrate it in my toolkit, even if it is at 10% of the level Vihang was at.
Lights out Alice!
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