2024-05-16 | 03:48:44 PM
Hey there! Quite nice to be writing this entry on my phone. I feel a whole lot more focused today, probably because of the nicotine patch that I took. I’m a former smoker — I used to cycle between smoking and not smoking depending on my stress level. I noticed that whenever I got stressed during our finals week at university, for example, or when I have a bunch of stuff to do at work, my inclination to buy a cigarette goes way higher than usual. I don’t know what phenomenon has to say but it probably has something to do with coping mechanisms.
2024-05-16 | 04:00:36 PM
I also did a lot today. It was nice being able to focus, after a while of being unable to. I’m not really sure how to explain — it could be placebo from the nicotine patch that I took, or it might actually be something to contribute to my focus level. It’s nice that I got to work on my work tasks today without the same level of brain fog that I’d been getting over the past few days. I might have to experiment on it though, since back then when I used Zyns. 1
I would say I’m not as obsessed with coding anymore as I had been during the first few days. I think that’s become apparent in my dev log. I’ll code later today after I finish the remaining stuff on my calendar.
2024-05-16 | 07:01:20 PM
I have to be honest — today hasn’t been the best. Some personal stuff’s going on today plus it’s one of those gloomy days when I just don’t feel like my best. I feel like I’m about to overcome a huge personal challenge soon. 2 It’s not always nice dealing with these kinda stuff, but as I said in my entry yesterday:
It’s one of those days that I don’t feel like doing the stuff I need to be doing. Part of it’s because I’m transitioning from a week of not managing my academic workload to now managing it again. It’s no excuse, though, and I know have no option but to tough it out.
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…I know I have no option but to tough it out.
”It is what it is,” some would say. And I agree. It’s the only choice I have. I write about this idea a lot, and I yap about it a lot. Here’s a quote from Amor Fati - Learning to Love And Accept Everything That Happens by Ryan Holiday:
Link to original
- You don’t have to like it to work with it—to use it to your advantage. But it starts by seeing it clearly and accepting it unconditionally. Amor fati— a love of what happens. Because that’s your only option.
There’s not really much I could do but to accept my fate, accept my condition, and accept whatever is given to me. It’s not within my remit to decide what happens — I can only influence what happens through taking the proper steps, whatever that might mean.
It sorta looks like this, where x (the one on the left) is equal to y (on the right): 3
- Live a healthy lifestyle = be healthy.
- Live an unhealthy lifestyle = be unhealthy.
- Eat healthy food = get healthy nutrients.
- Spend 1 hour coding = gain experience in development.
- Spend 2 hours thinking about systems = gain more knowledge regarding systems.
- Consume sad content = become sad. 4
- and a bunch more…
Out of the blue however (and I do this a lot in my journal), thinking about and understanding what makes me feel an emotion is leading me to contextualize such emotion in a manner that I otherwise wouldn’t achieve should I opt to just sit with it. Sitting with my emotion — as in feeling every bit of nuance within it — is something I do from time-to-time, but it isn’t my preferred method of going about life. I prefer to understand what it is that I’m actually feeling before I get to feel it. Some people would describe this inclination of mine as peculiar, given that it is obviously alluding to the possible fact that I could prefer to rationalize my emotions than to feel them. To which I agree: in some sense, what I do is rationalizing. But the point is I have, deep inside me, an uncontrollable urge to understand whatever it is that’s going through my mind before I could formally communicate them. Much to my chagrin, this is not the ideal way I would like to go about life. It’s almost as if I understand my emotions more than I feel them, which sucks a lot. I oftentimes couldn’t even separate actual sadness anymore from its construed version. The idea of sadness, after all, is different from sadness itself. Actions are different from words. I can say “I’m sad,” but I often wonder if I really am sad. I can say, “I want to cry,” yet not cry at all.
There’s a part of me that envies a lot of people when it comes to this phenomenon. It’s almost as if I see the world through a lens made of words, and words only — devoid of nuance, substance, and context. I frequently find myself understanding what my sadness is all about, yet struggle to feel something from it. My journal in some sense, is an extension of how I process my emotions (keyword is process, not engage with or feel), and I think that, at this point, it really shows.
I wish I could write more about what had happened today that led me to feel this way, but again, that’s for my private journal. All I can be honest about at this point is that I’m not feeling really well because of it.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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These are the most accessible nicotine patches in my area. I’ve seen other brands but they’re not as prominent as the ones I’d seen online, so I chose Zyn. ↩
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I won’t detail these kinda stuff here in my public journal, but you’re free to ask me whenever through the channels I’d provided in my basic information, should you care enough. These would most likely stay at my private journal. ↩
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Understandably, there’s a lot of limitations to this thinking. First is that the world is not black and white. That is to say it doesn’t work in ways that are binary. I would even go as far as to say that the events in our lives are like nodes in a system, much like the Obsidian graph — like a rhizomatic system. I get that I am oversimplifying life, in some sense, when say the paragraph this footnote is linked towards, but it’s the simplest lens through which I could communicate the context of my idea. ↩
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There are tons of nuances here, but again, I’m not pushing the context of a rhizomatic system in the list. A relatively and holistically (however those words are defined) could consume sad content and still become happy, as a result. Like listening to a particularly sad song but in a rather appreciative manner, than empathic. ↩