When Doubt Creeps In

And nothing is tidy or clear

Fair warning right up front: this post is, as my kids might say, just yap. Meaningless chatter, nothing important, just a snapshot of my mind today. Though I have over a dozen other drafts in various stages of development, none of them feel even close to done, and I don’t want to push them out into the world before they’re ready. The kids are off school this week and we’ve just returned from a (lovely) trip to visit family last weekend, so lately my writing time has been non-existent, plus the weekend before our trip I had an awful cold that now seems to have infiltrated my sinuses, and the constant headaches are interfering with my cognitive abilities, plus my daughter’s 16th birthday is coming up and I want to write something just for her, yet whenever I sit down in front of the laptop I find myself pining for the silly game I downloaded to my phone because an attention researcher on a podcast recommended it as a good brain-break that, unlike social media for example, doesn’t leave a residue that seeps back into your consciousness while you do other tasks, and sometimes it delivers on that promise but sometimes I just feel kind of addicted? Like it’s drawing me away from more important things? And yet I also enjoy the frivolity of it, as with anything the trick is in the balance I suppose, but sometimes it’s easier to just try to beat the next level instead of do something more mentally taxing, like write a post that actually says something.

This month I’ve felt myself sinking into such complacency, such disillusionment that anything can change, even though I keep saying the opposite in this space, and then I wonder what I am doing here, and all the drafts I started seem wrong somehow, and I think maybe they aren’t fit for the light of day after all, and even in my day-job life I have been constantly learning new things and stretching out of my comfort zone and I suspect this is what made me catch the cold that lingers still, the stress of growth, I can feel it in my head and my teeth and behind my eyes, the pressure, and also the guilt, that I am clacking away idly at the keyboard as the world disintegrates, because there’s a certain air of inevitability to it all, a sense that we are reaping what we’ve sowed, the nightmarish consequences of all the focus on short-term individual gains, the insistence on answering violence with more violence. And yet these consequences are so unevenly, so unjustly borne. I remain in relative comfort while others suffer horribly, and it’s uncertain whether anything I do is helping the big-picture situation in any way.

Once, I told myself that writing was my superpower, the skill that would help me make my contribution to the world and perhaps even bring about change, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just over here yapping away when what people really need is the kind of hope that isn’t made of words but of action, of relationship. And in my heart I know that it is ALL related and important, and there’s no question that I’ll keep writing and doing what I can out in the real world, but sometimes doubt still creeps in and makes me question everything.

Sometimes the doubt rolls in like a fog… pictured here as a low cloud floating above a swimming platform/dock on a gray lake

I capture these thoughts so I will remember that this is part of the process, this contraction that often comes after an expansion, the uneasy feeling that maybe I don’t actually know what the hell I’m doing. Sometimes it feels important to say outright that I don’t have it all figured out. So I send a messy post like this, a reminder that not everything is pretty or tidy or clear. And you know what? It feels really good to give myself this freedom. To release a little bit of that self-pressure and just say what’s on my mind, because even if in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t “matter,” my head feels a little clearer now, and that is definitely worth something to me.