It’s day 74 of me being a free agent. I loosely, naively thought that it would take me 30 days to “fully recover” from salaryman life and be a high-functioning individual getting all my shit done. Of course, that was probably never going to happen – if it were that easy, I would probably have been able to do it on-the-fly while I was still a salaryman. Anyway. Here we are, here we stand, let’s get moving.
It’s 803am. I went to bed pretty late, at almost 4am. I barely got any sleep before waking up at about 5am. I lounged around on my sofa with my phone for about an hour and a half, and then I went for a run. I’m pretty proud of my new definition of “going for a run” – I used to feel pretty shitty about my lack of fitness, and how unpleasant my longer runs were. I used to try to either run 2.4km (which is the arbitrary distance used in Singapore’s IPPT tests for soldiers), or jog for maybe about 15-20 minutes. Neither of those ever turned out to be very satisfying – I would be tired, winded, and not feel like I was making any progress. I would dread going for another run.
Now, I’ve switched to doing 1 minute sprints. It’s probably not a “real” sprint, since it’s not “truly maximum effort”, and maybe I don’t even have the right biomechanics or form to get it right. But whatever – the point is to run pretty hard for a minute. Then I walk for a minute, and do it again. I did 3 sets on 7th sept, 3 sets on the 10th, and today, on the 12th, I did 4 sets. I feel pretty good about it. It takes a fairly short amount of time, elevates my heart rate significantly, I break into a decent sweat, and I feel like I could probably do more. Maybe tomorrow or the day after I’ll do 5 sets. Or run a little longer and harder. Or reduce my rest interval (this seems less likely). Whatever the case, I feel pretty good about doing it again.
I was watching a Charisma on Command video in the shower (yeah… I sometimes watch youtube videos while I’m showering. I hang my phone on a couple of S hooks) and he talked about something interesting re: self-awareness. He said, I paraphrase, it can be useful to let yourself live in a sort of paradox or contradiction for a while while you’re figuring things out. Ie, you can know what you need to do, and be okay with the fact that you haven’t done it yet. This reminds me of what Allen Carr talks about in the easyway to quit smoking – you’re not supposed to quit the moment you start reading the book. You’re supposed to keep smoking as per normal. I think the idea here is to get rid of the unnecessary guilt and shame associated with repeated failure. This in turn reminds me of a conversation I had with my boss once, about oscillation and behavior change. I’ve touched on this a few times in my word vomits.
What else did I want to talk about? I’ve been procrastinating on making a video status update. (I ended up watching my entire last video again, which I made 7 months ago, and I actually really like it).
On Twitter, a couple of friends were talking about stress – and someone linked to an old blogpost about how recovery is whimsical and dynamic – ie it’s not quite possible to “recover on demand”.
What am I doing here? I’m trying to transition from “total bum” to “being productive for myself again”. I don’t want to reach 100 days of free agent life without having accomplished some stuff. This is word vomit 717. How many more vomits could or should I be doing?
Another thing I tweeted – I saw a thread about “my biggest mistake”, and I found myself wondering what mine was. And while my first instinctual answers were “not managing my time better, not managing my energy better, not being more disciplined,” and so on, I feel like the deeper answer is “not indulging myself and my nonsense more”. All of the best things I’ve done in my life, in my opinion, came from me indulging myself and my weirdness. If i could change only one thing about myself, I would be more weird more often. Because that’s where the good stuff is.
I’m thinking about how these vomits have developed a sort of structure. I started developing this idea that each vomit should have a singular focus, because my early vomits were disjointed and in disarray. (This is still a useful thing to keep in mind, because when I’m looking back on 1,000 posts, I want to know what each post is about, and I have much less patience for dealing with “oh it’s about a little bit of everything…” type posts). I also came to the idea that each post should have a “directive” – it should be an instruction of sorts – because it’s somehow easier to reconstruct the entire post from a directive (eg “consider X”) than a relatively vague statement (“X”). These are valid insights, but I’m wondering now if they may have constricted me in a way. I mean… If I wrote a vomit a day over the past 70+ days, I would be almost at 800 now. Finishing this project seems like something that’s just around the corner, and yet also really far away. Would I be okay with doing 200 incoherent-ish status updates? Well, I know myself and I know I wouldn’t allow that to happen. So what is it, then? Do I give more fucks or less fucks? Can I start with an interesting observation and just explore that? Start with a question? Start with older vomits and do recap-reviews?
I’m not sure. But I want to get this done, get it out of my system, and close the book on this. I think I have a lot of prompts in my todo list that I’m not really enjoying, and I feel quite guilty about them. I want to give myself the freedom to not give a fuck – to just delete each thing that doesn’t spark a Hell Yes.