Yesterday was a classic case of me not waking up on time and thus missing my two hours of working in absolute inaccessibility.

What is that?

I do not tell the world I am awake – which means: I do not step out of my room, do not play loud music, do not tweet, post a story, reply to texts, nothing. My two hours – whatever I might be spending them doing – set the tone for the day. This give the rest of my day some structure, some sense of accomplishment and mental peace as I while away my time on Googling random things like “The social roots of suicide.” Otherwise, there is a bomb ticking in my brain: This day is going to the drain; I am wasting it; I need to stay up at night to justify it.

Why do I do that?

For some reason, peak day hours are too distracting. There is too much happening. The laundry man drops off clothes. The grocery person delivers. There is this pressure of feeding myself proper food and fruits or else my grandma assumes I am dying. Some calls with people just because. I think most calls should be 20 mins. Or 45 mins, if you wanna go wild. Anything more than that is something like disguised unemployment – it’s disguised procrastination, disguised un-productivity. Or sometimes, I am just hyper-aware of the fact that my nails are long or that my toes are touching each other or that someone on the floor above me just moved a chair. RANDOM. DISTRACTING. STUFF.

Being able to rant about all of this and doing teeny tiny work in small, erratic windows is an insane privilege I have today. But instead of beating myself over it like I always do, today I will choose to be okay with it. I come up with decent output. I am willing to keep showing up till I also get decent outcomes. I am mostly doing okay. This is how I stay my sanest. So, it’s okay.

Moreover, it’s not like I laze all day. I do make jokes about it. But I don’t actually, very much do it. I try to waddle through work even on the most distracted of days, even if I feel like a small duckling swimming on tsunami waves sometimes. It’s not mostly great output – or output I am satisfied with – either. But I believe this practice would help.

A little bit from yesterday

A slept for a couple extra hours yesterday. The world began it’s day, of course. And then it was downhill from there. No story time on this because I am the one who wrote this piece on cribbing. (Haven’t posted this cus I never ended up finishing it) Doing that would be highly hypocrite behaviour.

So, I have very, very well learnt my lesson on not missing my time – come hell or highwater.

Quick things about my writing space

I realise this is very self-centred and might be of zero value to folks. And I think, there might be two ways around it.

1. Let my blogs be a place to help make sense of things. Have some space to talk. A little bit of shrink x dear diary space. And my newsletters could be a place where I try and post things which might be of value to a reader.
2. I write tiny chunks of sensible, some-value things everyday and collate them on Substack. Tiny because I start struggling the moment sensible pieces go north of 300 words. But do I have something to say everyday? No clue.

I will figure this out and report to you, reader.

But until tomorrow, I will see you around. Twitter. Instagram. One of those places.

Bye!