Decisions

I've just found out over the course of a few days that deciding for myself to do a task, aka choosing to do it with my will creates much more joy than being forced to do it or procrastinating by doing it. Even if a task is something I hate or something that hurts me, when I make it a point to  mentally make the choice (when I say along the lines of "I choose to do this." to myself), my brain seems to activate a sense of pride or bliss that vanquishes almost all pain, sorrow, and doubt, or at the very least renders them completely irrelavent. This is quite a discovery and will surely help me in bettering myself, but what's really interesting about this new-found exercise is that doing it will not only make me feel better as I'm going through a task, but it will also make me feel better when I think back on the task, which is something that I've been struggling with, and has really been getting me down.

I've been having trouble looking at my past actions positively for a while now. When I watch a movie, for instance, there will be a little voice in my head saying that maybe I can't watch movies anymore, maybe I can't concentrate enough to get immersed, maybe I'm getting absolutely nothing from sitting in front of the tv and staring at the screen, maybe that character is being fake, maybe this story has been done to death, maybe this trope is stupid, maybe the movie's taking too long, etc.. This voice will babble on throughout the whole movie, constantly casting and recasting doubt in my mind, so by the time I finish the movie, I feel like I've completely missed the point; I feel like my mind has somehow prevented itself from absorbing any information; and on top of all that, I feel like I'm doing it on purpose, like I'm pretending to be bad at watching the movie just to prove that I can.


I have to digress for four paragraphs here because I just realized that I need to get this shit out of my head and on paper where it can at the very least can be scrutinized without being all buddy buddy with the scrutinizer, so here we go: I'm pretty sure that I am pretending to be bad at absorbing information and focusing on tasks, and I think I know the reason why. The reason I'm pretending to be bad is that, somewhere deep down in my soul, I want it to be impossible for me to be bad. I want to be able try my hardest to fail and end up succeeding anyways. I want my capabilities to be completely solid, completely black and white, and completely clear of any doubt.

A while ago, I discovered something about myself that put a lot of strain on one of the main strands of the web of confidence and clarity I had about my capabilities and beliefs. The weight on the strand made me worry, so instead taking the weight off the strand, which would have probably made me stronger, I decided to test it's strength. In a very worried state, I kept putting more and more weight on the strand until eventually, the strain completely severed it, which really hit me hard.

Up until that point, I had never even concieved of the idea of a strand breaking. I had had strands be strained a little and sometimes a lot, but they'd never been broken, so I reacted ridiculously. Instead of abandoning the idea that strands were invincible and making a new strand to replace the one I lost, I clung to the dead one. I refused to accept the idea that strands could break. I refused to accept the idea that I'd broken one of them. I tried to fix it; I tried desperately hard to fix it; I tried with all of my might to fix it because it was the most important thing in the world to me, but it didn't work, so I was basically forced to accept that it was broken; it was dead; it was gone. In finally realizing this, what did I do? Did I immediately pull the weight off the other ones to keep them from breaking, too? Nope. Did think about what I'd done? Nope. Did I spend more than a second thinking about what to do next? Of course not. Instead, I started fucking testing all of the other strands! Eventually, I realized what I was doing and created a system to prevent myself from testing them too far.

But the habits of testing them, the feelings of testing them, and the spirit of testing them are all still there. They're almost like a web of their own that I have to slowly dissassemble. They are starting to fade, but very slowly, very carefully.


Hmmm....what was I talking about before? Oh yeah, movies.

Back to movies, when I think back on a movie I've watched, my testing habits make me pretend that I can't remember scenes from it, pretend that it's all a blur. Instead of thinking of the things that happened in the movie clearly in conscisely, I put a misty haze in front of my eyes before I recall a scene or think about a character. I don't think logically about the plot, or it least I make it really hard for myself to do so.

But (back to the main topic of this post) that is where making desicions comes in. My recent discovery was that whenever I wactched movies, I never really decided outright that I was going to watch them. I just sort of slipped into them in a half-procrastinatious, half-desperate daze. When I decide to actually watch a movie, or actually think about it, things come to me much more clearly. However, deciding to do so takes willpower, so I can't do it all the time, at least not easily. I guess I still have a ways to go in feeling better about myself, but at least I'm making progress.

Yay!