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Being noncommittal and stalling I seem to have a serious problem committing to things. Any reservation that I might have seems to put itself in the way of a goal. I might become reluctant to pursue a goal and come up with distractions or I might devote solid time of 10% energy trudging on when I'm tired or otherwise occupied mentally. Or I might spend time coming up with an organization scheme just so that I can utterly ignore it and forget about it. When I think about it, I can only see myself as a person of extremely weak will. I suppose this is what makes me a patient person.
My hope is that by writing about this commitment problem, by examining why it is that my reservations have so much influence after a decision is made, and by coming to terms with my weak will power, I can strengthen my will, let my reservations only speak before I've decided and become capable of committing to things. But even now, I'm thinking, “this all sounds well and good, but do I really think it will have an impact? Do I really think that writing about my indecision will help me out of my rut?” I'm thinking this, and I'm thinking I'd like to go see how the Red Sox are doing, and I'm thinking, if I stay here and force myself to write, I might be able to come up with a mediocre piece of crap to put up on my website about which I can be embarrassed. This is really kind of a catch-22. I even have reservations about describing my reservations. I almost feel like I'm in the middle of a teeter-totter, swaying but not moving. And many of my thoughts revolve around another idea, “maybe I'm mostly over this whole thing, and writing about and chronicling it will simply encourage a bad habit.” Either way I've made a little progress on writing about my commitment problems, like someone with writers block just writing about the writers block, only in this case it actually seems pertinent. In any event, one thought that seems to hold me up when writing or formulating and executing writing projects is the question “where am I going to put this on TheUnspecialized.com?” I think, “man if I go through with this I'm going to have to totally redo the organization scheme for the site.” As if that really matters. As if the organization determines the content, not the other way around. And as if it's not extremely quick and simple to change what needs changing. Instead I start thinking “but, but, but.” Consequently, if I were to offer a hypothesis for what is going on in my mind in these instances, it would be that my subconscious(for lack of a better term) is pretty fearful of any change and does not like being challenged. When I formulate a goal that I can accomplish my subconscious mind starts groping for excuses to stop, excuses not to change. Rather than fight the battle in the rational conscious mind, it picks execution phase, which is the phase where fear and discomfort have a greater impact on my actions [What have I done here? I've introduced some new technical sounding words that I probably don't understand (subconscious, phase, hypothesis) and I've essentially re-described what I wrote above. The only real difference that I see in rereading the above two paragraphs is an admission of fear of change. Sometimes this fear of change seems daunting, like the fear is so giant that an attempt to get rid of it wouldn't even be worth the effort if I could get over it. But then I think about the times in my life when I was really able to set out a task and get it done, how powerful I felt and how happy. And then I compare that with how I feel now, incomplete, powerless, stalled, and I think, no, anything, any effort, every effort would be worth getting over this and feeling like that. That it's not even really an option or a choice at all, I need to expand my will power and start developing and completing my projects, failing to do them is what costs me, doing them benefits me, not even really a choice at all. It's simply a desire not to choose. And now we're back to fear of change.] Along with what I believe I've identified as a fear of change, I also seem to have a general apathy. This apathy often kicks in in the middle of a project, when I'm having doubts about it. When I'm in the process of talking myself out of accomplishing a goal I've set for myself, I realize, that, I often really don't care. I've been able to come up with dozens and dozens of reasons for why apathy is actually the rational choice (the foremost being the peril my country's leadership is sending the world, the country, it's young and it's future members into, as though putting this country and a relatively peaceful world out of their misery were it's chief mission, and my powerlessness to stop or otherwise effect it) and why I really shouldn't care about much of anything, but I'm pretty sure these reasons are wrong, since they are all actually irrelevant to my interest in things. But the apathy is there nonetheless. It's there despite rationality, not because of it. And these “arguments” pop up and help me remain inert. My new tactic for getting over my apathy, for trying to have an interest in things(in addition to things like exercise and vitamin supplements and writing about how I feel with the intent of publishing it on my website) is, rather than trying to take an interest in things (force myself to care) and then being disappointed with myself for feeling blank and alien, I just try to listen, whether it be to music, people talking or whatever. I simply think to myself, “I'll hear this person out, if nothing else, I'll try to remember what she had to say”. I take a deep breath and I begin to simply try to understand. This seems to be somewhat effective. Rather than becoming impatient and ignoring or becoming disappointed with myself for a being absolutely cold and inhuman to the person I seem to be able to trick myself into becoming interested when I don't start thinking about myself (which is often my concentration breaker while listening to music). When I'm able to just listen, when I'm able not to think about myself this is really the time where my patience (which really can be quite extreme for a human) actually seems like something I'd like to have and not some sort of a curse or defect that I have to cover up. But I digress, this tactic for getting over apathy really only has limited application. It's not really applicable to writing and it's scarcely a tactic anyway. Furthermore, whatever feelings and reflections I was hoping to describe and whine about have been forgotten. So I'm just going to cut this whole thing short because I really feel very different than I did when I started. Maybe it's beginning to work, or maybe the Sox are about to play.
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