Day 236

What is self-care, really? Is it taking things easy, or is it approaching things at the same pace all the time but thinking more about how you do things? Or is it simply not spending any time thinking, overthinking? That’s where Aggie came from, really, from this idea, that we’d all be much happier if we spent no time thinking and analysing at all. Although she’s still nowhere near the end of her journey. But it’s almost impossible not to think, and I have to say that I have, over the last couple of days, thought long and hard about whether or not to consign this blog and Aggie to the scrap heap of my unsuccessful projects. Because the paradox is that I spend a large amount of my days thinking about what I’m going to write here the next day, and a lot of the time the words that curl around my head like the smoke in TS Eliot’s Prufrock just seem superfluous and useless and whingy. And I wonder if the physical issues I have right now are related to this constant need to find words to put on these blank pages every day.

There’s another side to this, too. There is hardly any hand-written material in either of my journals right now, because all my thoughts get poured into this. The issue with that is that the hand-written material was never self-censored, whilst this here is. And to an extent this means that I’m not actually pouring everything out onto some page or another. And, following this course logically, that means that I’m not actually letting go of a lot of things, which then stay worries inside me – maybe that’s the real explanation for my body’s current rebellion. But staying up late and scribbling illegible curses into my journal is not going to be the answer. And lifting the veil of self-censorship certainly is not the answer either. This is something for me to discuss in my therapy sessions later.

One irritation I want to mention – USB-C. Yes, it’s great that it doesn’t matter which way up you plug the cable into your phone, but the connection is shite, in truth. Once again, I’ve got up this morning, and the phone hasn’t charged, although, when I put it down last night, the old Thor lightning bolt was showing on its battery icon. This is all down to the inferior USB-C fit, and it’s very annoying indeed (and before anyone says anything, I am using the original cable supplied with the phone). That’s my gripe for the day.

I just popped across to my dear friend Ren’s blog for today. She couches her daily impressions in such rich and poetic language, which I seem not to be able to do with mine; well, not most of the time anyway. You must read her and her poems. She is an artisan. On that note…

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 189