When I was doing a similar schedule, it was a failure of introspection, and a mounting number of unprocessed emotional issues, and unconfronted personal problems.
The way I got over it is that I have started realizing, confronting, communicating these issues. I "sat down with myself" daily just to think for 15 minutes, without any distraction like youtube. Communicated what I though were my problems to my partner, friends, parents, therapist, forums, LLM.
Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.
I also picked up hobbies that nurture the specific parts that I was lacking. For example, I had a very hard time to persistently care about living things. But after a leap of faith I successfully kept a plant alive, and I slowly build a hobby around this.
Funnily enough, youtube helped in this, because I also shaped that so that the helpful videos remained. While doing chores, self-care and other such things, I listened to a lot of mental health, lifestyle, introspective, hobby content, and these were wonderful sources of inspiration.
In a way, having a bluetooth headphone also helped a lot. It helped to bridge the gap between the digital world, which was my only comfort zone, and the "irl", which was like the cold, hard, overwhelming rest of the world that I didn't really want to deal with.
Very illuminating.
> Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.
Could you give some examples of those patterns?
Sure thing.
For example, my plants were always dying. I hated that, and I hated facing my inability every time I interacted with them (granted, there weren't many in the first place). I hated to touch soil and the general mess that happens when maintaining them. I was really disgusted by the way a rotten stem felt, how the soil stank after watering, and I was confused about where to put them, what to do with growth, browning leaves, etc. It was an overwhelming ball of negative emotions.
One time after multiple of them really died, I gave them new soil and vowed that this time I will really water regularly. I did, and they actually came back to life. I was very happy about it, and it inspired me to look up more information about them. That inspired me to have more plants, which in turn meant more work with them. I found youtubers I really liked who kept a lot of houseplants, and watching them normalized the chores for me, and helped me get an idea on how things actually look, and what it all takes. I began to have ideas about where I want to go with this. I dared things like repotting, buying different species, growing them from a small cutting. I went a little into interior design. I bought a plant nursery lamp. And the plants loved it!
The negative emotions all but went away, and positive ones gained traction - or I should rather say destructive and constructive. Behind hate and disgust I realized sadness and fear, and overcoming that I realized curiosity, stability, a warm pride toward myself and my creations.
I had a similar evolution in most other parts of my life, like relationships with people, relationship with animals, relationship with self.
Turned out from this all, the ingredient that I sorely missed was a courage to put myself out there. To find out what I am actually like, and to represent that genuinely in the different situations of life. This same pattern, fear of expressing myself, and repressing parts of me that I dislike or doubt, served as a foundation for many of my seemingly actual problems, like the inability to keep a little green thing alive, and so many more.
This is a good post, thanks for sharing.