Wakeup
I had a painful but necessary wakeup call this morning. I’m currently ill with some virus (again!) and sitting at home feeling sorry for myself. I’ve also been indulging rather too much in an online multiplayer game named World of Warcraft.
Used to be that I spent all my time playing online things – building stuff in Active Worlds etc, to the exclusion of all else – and this is something I promised I wouldn’t do with WoW. I’ve been reasonably careful about dropping it whenever something needs my attention, but I’ve been going back to it a little more often than I should. The thing is, I’ve realised this morning that WoW isn’t the problem in itself – it’s a symptom.
See, I have this extreme capacity for focus, but most of the time it comes into play in the wrong way. For example I’m astoundingly good at avoidance and escapism – which WoW is a form of. Sometimes I’ll read novel after novel after novel and justify it to myself as reading so it can’t be bad – but I do it constantly and am doing nothing else. The signs of this behaviour are usually the same – little things around the house not being paid attention to, that sort of thing. I’m not entirely sure yet what’s triggered it this time but I am realising that it’s all symptomatic of something major I’m trying to avoid or trying to forget about. Whenever something major in my life comes up that I have difficulty facing I tend to do this.
I suspect it’s to do with change at the moment – a lot is changing in my life and I think deep down I’m a bit scared of it. I got ill for a while, and used that as an excuse to almost stop attending the gym completely – where I was on a very good wicket and making progress. Similarly with other things – for example I’ve found myself watching more television again. All these things come down to the simple expedient of being able to suspend my day to day life so as to avoid thinking about something, and it results in a lot of procrastination.
As usual, R helps me to see the truth, and now I’m left with some soul searching to do. I keep attempting to cure the symptoms without always realising the cause – which I’m guessing is why I always seem to slip back. With the new directions my life has been taking over the last year fixing all this should be a part of it, but I think it’s all the new stuff that’s causing it 
So what to do? The symptoms aren’t the root of the problem but they are a big problem in themselves – and I can’t expect R and B to put up with them for example, nor should I be allowing myself to wallow like that. Part of the cycle though is a tacit acknowledgement of this, followed by avoidance of the symptoms because I know “that’s not the real problem”. So this time I’m realising I have to do things differently. Rather than focusing narrowly on particular symptoms, or ignoring all symptomatic problems as a whole, i must attack them immediately, and also dig deeper at the same time to find the root of this problem – and weed it out.
As I said I suspect it lies in the change that’s happening – I kid myself thinking I’m all about change and “moving on up” at the moment, but inside I’m as scared as anyone else might be about the new directions in my life. Some things that have been with me since my early childhood have been shaken and in some cases removed, and I haven’t really addressed the stress that has caused. So I have this virus to get over, but I can see a number of ways to work on symptoms right now without overtaxing myself physically. In the meantime, I need to think carefully about the deeper problems and what I can do about them.
Transformation can be a powerful and scary thing. Don’t pretend to yourself that just because you’re going through some stage of grand rebirth that there’s not some part of you that’s hesitant about the changes – it’s a natural part of human life. When it’s not addressed, the big (and good) changes fall on their face because you undermine yourself. I’m not going to allow this to happen now though – not when I’m so close to everything I’ve dreamed of.
P.S. as a concrete example – have a look at my blogging patterns over the last month or two You can see where things really start to become obvious – because I avoid blogging about it all!
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