After having family stay with us for a few days, I usually feel like I need a day off to myself to recover from the energy kicked up from so many people around me. During this visit, however, I kept retreating to WebWhore Headquarters (that's what I call my home office) for a couple hours here and there, allowing myself to WORK to relax.

Instead of picking work that I really *need* to do that's high priority for making money, I allowed myself to work on low-priority stuff that's fun and not complex or stressful (except for feeling guilty for not doing more important things) and requires no interaction with other people. Stuff that's compact, like blogging and posting one-pagers on domains I've had for a long time that have been sitting, completely BLANK. My thought is that anything I accomplish is a bonus since I should be taking time off from work while family is here for our late-Thanksgiving so I should do something totally relaxing instead of tangling with bigger projects.

Here are some of the one-pagers I've made over the past week or two:

Worse Than Porn
TrixieDoll
Borg Porn
DeliaTS
Give Me Sugar

It's soothing to play with fonts and colors and inspiring to remind myself of concepts and ideas that interest me. Only a couple of those were frivolous, actually, with no immediate application, but I still feel conflicted all the time and defensive about the choices I make with my time. Like if I enjoy it and other people might not understand where it fits in the puzzle, then I should feel badly about it. There are a lot of things I'm choosing to NOT do, and I constantly imagine a crowd of people criticizing my choices, saying "what, she's not doing X so she can do Y and Z?? THAT is stupid! She hasn't earned the right to waste time doing that -- I want X! I want X! Y and Z are useless! She would be so much better off doing X; a bigger commitment to doing X would solve all of her problems, can't she see that?"

One of my goals is to stop worrying so much about the critics, both external critics and my own internal asshole voices who can ALWAYS find some way to make me feel like I'm not doing good enough. I need to focus on what I'm doing right (and right NOW), not what I'm doing wrong (or not doing at the moment). Unfortunately I'm often painfully aware that every choice I make to do one thing means not doing ten billion others. It's depressing and I have to knock that shit off. Being on Ritalin does help a lot because I can sit down and focus on something without intrusive thoughts and ideas continually popping into my head of all the other things I can/should be doing which then make me totally anxious, overwhelmed, afraid to proceed with the task at hand, and hopeless because of my limitations and lack of giant progress.

I know a lot of people struggle with similar feelings, so I share this for a couple reasons: because I know other people can relate and it always feels good to know you're not the only one with these kinds of challenges, and because it helps ME to type out my fears and remind myself I don't want to carry them around. I want to be happy with what I *can* do and what I *want* to do right now at this moment. I want to look at what I've done and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride, not guilt and maudlin hyper-criticism.

*****

Anyway, the family is gone now, our spycams are back up, and Delia's warming up some of her delicious turkey & stuffing leftovers. Life is good.

Labels: accomplishments, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, escapism, family, fears, food, goals, inspiration, links, mundane, thanksgiving, therapy, webwhore insights, work

posted by Trixie at 12/03/2008 05:24:00 PM -