Bullet Journals and Questioning Goals

Two links, to start with.

First, Lifehacker has a really interesting post about finding your real goals by asking why you want/do certain things, which is one of those things I urge writers to do an awful lot in You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’s also a remarkably useful skill in other aspects of your life–I’ve used it to solve problems in day-job gigs, supervisor’s meetings, and personal relationships, and it proved to be a remarkably big part of the conversation I kept having with my psychologist last year.

Second, the bullet journal is my productivity system of choice because it’s hackable and adapts to my schedule, getting complex on the months I need complexity and streamlined on the months when my workload is relatively focused. I picked up the BuJo habit from Kate Cuthbert, and it’s slowly spread through a whole bunch of friends and family, to the point where a large chunk of our family Christmas is now spent talking notebooks and layouts.

With all that in mind, this article where a behavioural neuroscientist is interviewed about why the bullet journal system works is one of my favourite things this week. Go check it out.

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Two years ago, right about the this time, my GP surprised me with a diagnosis of anxiety and depression. It wasn’t surprising because I thought I was okay. Just surprising because I assumed that the not-okay was normal, that the constant anger and frustration I’d been feeling for a while was the result of short-term stress.

The stress, of course, had been there for a few years and never seemed to end. That was beside the point. I’d gotten used to the feeling that I was a dysfunctional, inhuman fuck-up masquerading as a competent human, and largely assumed everyone was like that and just better at coping or wearing the mask. I assumed these things weren’t signs of my mental health deteriorating because a) I could always point to a cause (or causes) for my stress, b) I didn’t seriously think about killing myself, although I had all kinds of intrusive thoughts about self-harm during really bad days, and c) I assumed people would notice if something was really wrong.

I wasn’t sad enough to be depressed. Things weren’t bad enough. I got really good at talking myself out of getting help. Once I started getting help and recognising how out-of-whack my baseline was, I noticed a couple of friends using much the same rationalisations, which ultimately how I ended up pitching this post about the ways we talk ourselves out of getting help at my former blogging gig.

I mention this today because getting help was incredibly useful, and I wish I’d done it earlier. Ignored the little voice that told me it may be depression, but it’s not particularly bad and got help immediately, instead of waiting for things to build to a crisis point.

This doesn’t change the fact that asking for help is fucking hard. When your mental health is wonky, you get really good at convincing yourself there’s nothing wrong.  avoided it as long as possible, only went because I’d started crying in front of people at work.

I got myself through the clinic door by saying I was only there to assuage my parents fears, but I went. I got help and getting help led to tools that helped me manage things. All that weight that had settled around my life ceased being a crushing pressure, and became something that could be cleared away or shaped into something useful.

Getting help is hard, but it’s fucking worth it.

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Today was not a good day for marking, which makes me wonder if the day off was a mistake. I dragged my feet getting to the computer, daydreaming about actually writing something of my own instead. I spent far too much time writing the section above this, then deleting it, then writing it over again.

Somewhere amid all that, while deleting a section about self-care and watching for warning signs, I realised that reading The Writers Room was entirely the wrong call this week. All these interviews with people thinking deeply about the craft of writing just fed into the unsettled feeling that has set in after a week of marking, making it harder to fend off the whispering anxiety that tells me I’m taking too long or doing the job poorly.

Twenty assignments to go at time of writing. 60,000 words or so. I think my plan of being done by Sunday may be a little ambition.