Weekly Rewind: May 22

Wow, it’s been almost a month since my last “weekly” rewind! Though, as with all the other weekends I’ve skipped I have a good reason... or not... Well, the long and short of it is that I’ve been busy (but when are we not?) and in general just haven’t felt very introspective or sentimental lately. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re in month five of 2021 and now’s about the time where I usually fall off the wagon of any habits I try to build, or if I’m just really not feeling it for one reason or another. But I’ll take any chance I can to try to get myself back on again, so I’m glad I could sit down today and take some time for this.

I feel like I’ve been in somewhat of a funk. In some ways, buying a house has now made me feel like I have nowhere to call home. Is that weird? I’m constantly vacillating between “wow, I own a house!” to “but this isn’t really my home, it’s just an investment” So it’s hard to feel too attached to the house even though I do feel protective of it as mine. It’s just not a place I feel like I can pour myself into because part of me wants to remain a bit detached. There’s also the small detail of I don’t actually live in Southern California, except now I do?? Then we have my room in Northern California. The place I have called home for the past three years. I didn’t really have issues before of feeling like I have a place I belong because I had one room that holds all the stuff I’ll ever want or need. Except now, I have a house that’s not here and that also requires stuff I want and need. So either I need to transport things back and forth every time I go between places, or I’ll need to double up. Both options have their pros and cons, but both options make me think but where do these things belong? The answer is nowhere in particular. And I think that’s what’s getting to me. I now feel like I can’t really consider my NorCal room home because I don’t own it the way I own my SoCal house. But I can’t truly live in my SoCal house the way I can truly live in my NorCal room. And I’ve just been feeling like this over and over and haven’t made any progress in reconciling either conflict. I guess I could see it well now I have two homes! But it’s hard to do that when no matter where you are you’re missing something.

When I get this way, I also start to think that maybe I shouldn’t complain because I own a home, but there’s just so much stress that comes with it that at least in this moment, I’m not sure it’s even worth it. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job at maintaining it and setting it up in a timely manner to be rented out. I’m super lagging and there’s not really anything pushing me to be more effective at it other than other people constantly asking me when I’m going to put the listing up. I can’t even keep my own room clean, how am I supposed to run a household? A big part of me wishes I could go back to being an ignorant renter and have that be that. But I also know I was going to have to go through this eventually, so maybe better to do it now??

But anyway, I’ve also noticed that in general, I just haven’t felt like doing anything. I’ve lagged on my bullet journaling and every time I think I should work on it, I choose not to and choose to do something else. May is almost over and I haven’t even finished one weekly spread even though I used to do one or two in a week. Not to mention journaling as a whole, I do very poorly now. Since the start of the year, I’ve journaled every day, then once a week I would prepare a bullet journal spread and transfer my writing to the spread. But now, not only do I not work on the spread, I also barely write daily. There are weeks where I go to my journal entries and realize I haven’t written all week, then I need to backtrack and try to remember what happened, and rarely do I succeed at remembering what happened a week ago with any sort of clarity. So the quality of my journaling has plummeted, and knowing that even makes me want to do it less, but I know I have to get out of that habit and just try to pick up where I left off no matter what.

I’m still keeping up with my fitness, so at least I’m maintaining that. But as with most years, at some point I notice that the amount of commitment and effort I put into my workout wanes. And this is one of the ruts that I’m in. I’m doing the workouts, and I’m trying my best, but I also know that my mind is elsewhere and I’m not really doing the best I can do. And instead of being excited to work out, I dread it. I do it anyway, but I don’t look forward to it anymore.

My feelings towards CLP lately have been tenuous at best. I feel the utmost guilt for not feeling super dedicated to this because it’s still my company. It’s still something that I want to succeed. But more and more as we run into conflict and run out of answers to them, I’m losing steam. I barely maintain the social media, I write blog posts for it the night before we’re supposed to post them, I feel barely present in meetings or anything. I just don't know where I am or where I stand here, or maybe I do know and I’m just afraid to say it out loud.

Even Disneybounding I’ve been a little lukewarm about lately. It used to be so fun to come up with outfits and try to make work, and to draw backgrounds to go with the outfit. But it’s actually been a looong time since I drew anything in Procreate, and I feel really bad about that. It’s mostly because I’ve been recycling bounding outfits that either already had a background or I just didn’t have the time to commit to drawing a new one. And even though there is no end of bounding challenges to participate in, I find myself looking at prompts and just not wanting to come up with a character. But because May is AAPI heritage month and there were two bounding challenges that were dedicated to Asian characters, I really wanted to participate in all of the days because celebrating Asian representation is so important to me. So I was able to get myself into some outfits, take some pictures, and do some edits again. It was nice to put that much effort back into something, but for some reason it’s just not the same...? I really think (or at least hope) all of this indifference is coming from the same place and is temporary. Because I love bounding, and I hope that I can have as much excitement for it as I did before. And that really applies to all the other things I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like I’ve put much heart into anything lately and I really want to snap out of it.

I even had my own personal project that I was so excited for at the beginning of April that quickly fizzled out. I don’t even feel like doing it anymore, or looking into anything I needed to study. Even though I want to do it, I don’t want to do it.

So yeah, I guess the feeling I’ve been feeling lately is a bit of ennui? I don’t know if this is just part of my cycles, where I face these ruts of complete disinterest or what. But they’re not fun and I have yet to find an effective way out of them short of letting it pass. One thing I think I should work on though is, knowing that I run into these moments often, I would like to stop feeling so guilty about them. Maybe it’s hustle culture that always makes me feel like any moment not spent doing something productive is a moment wasted, which just builds me up for a longer burnout phase, which breeds more guilt, and I’m never able to fully recover. I don’t know. But now that I’m calling it out, I hope I can do a better job of recognizing when it happens and just letting it happen instead of giving myself such a hard time over it?