Anxiety, Procrastination, and Plants.
Heads up… This week I’m just going to talk. There won’t be a topic that I have chosen to research, or draw out from the deep chambers within my memory and experience storage banks. This is just me talking about what I have experienced this fall/winter and hoping that someone out there can relate to what I’m sharing.
I took some time off last week from blogging. I try to have my MWJ blog post ready every Saturday at noon EST, but last week I just wanted to hit pause on the researching and writing. When I say it like that, it sounds like a very well thought and calculated plan, but that isn’t the case. It was a week in which a dealt with a lot of brain scramble, as I call it. “Ennui,” as a friend more eloquently stated. I stressed and toiled about whether or not I should write a post until the last moment. It wasn’t even the blog or the subject matter that I stressed about, I was stressing about stressing and worrying about…I don’t even know what. Sometimes, for me, things just get to be overwhelming. Like many of us, I have a lot of jobs. There isn't just the “job” in the traditional sense where you go and clock-in, work, and then clock-out. There’s life, too. Sometimes parts of life for me begin to feel more like a job than they should, and I want to preserve the joy. Sometimes I don’t recognize that I’ve lost the joy until I’ve already been swallowed by overwhelm. That’s where I was last week. And that’s fine. I’m not judging it. Or, I’m not judging it now. I judged myself harshly last week, so harshly that I thought I might as well just throw in the towel and quit. It’s silly to recall now, but in the heat of those moments, it feels so real. The build-up inside my head is much scarier than the reality.
Six years ago, I had no TV, no iPad, no internet service in my home, and just an iPhone that I used primarily for texting. These were all choices that I made intentionally. I am prone to anxiety and I’ve always had a weird thing about social media - mixed feelings, you could say. I guess I saw all things technological as having the ability to clutter my mind. I never felt drawn to being a technology “power user” until moving to Ohio. I still don’t feel drawn to that lifestyle, but I’m in it pretty deeply now. When I moved here, I found myself hundreds of miles away from everything I had known as home, work, family, and friends. A lot had changed for me. Technology began to play a larger role in my life as I connected with family and friends via technology instead of over dinner. Before I knew it, I had an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, and Mac. And this wasn’t all just for communication. I began to enjoy a lot of the benefits that go along with technology. I use it now for fitness, organization, cooking, blogging, entertainment.
As my identity as a crazy plant lady took shape, I knew that I wanted to blog. Writing has always been my preferred mode of communication. The idea of mixing plants and writing was like a dream to me. Then all the crazy set in. Who’s going to read it? How will they find my tiny blog deep in the ethers of the internet? Will my content be interesting? That’s where Instagram came in. I had no idea that there was a massive plant community out there with whom I could share all my plant whims and desires. That’s been so fulfilling, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel the pressure to meet a certain standard that I’ve set for myself. No one, mind you, has ever told me there’s a standard to achieve or held me to the flame, so to speak. I push myself hard and sometimes I allow the joy to leave the room when it wasn’t really necessary. I still struggle with living in a digital world, and the things I have to do to adapt to it. Most of the time, I purely love my little corner of the internet. Sometimes I feel guilt for loving and investing so much into it! And other times, like last week, I feel overwhelmed by the idea of holding onto my presence and internet accountability. Blogging and writing have always been my creative loves, and they’ll remain as such at least for as far as I am able to glimpse into the future.
I have a few other projects that I’ve been working on, and that’s what I chose to spend my time on last week. What could have been a really really bad week ended up being just…off. And that’s because plants really are my therapy. Having fun projects on my mind and in my hands made all the difference in my wellbeing. It kept my head above water, and it uplifted me when I looked around my house and saw pretty things that had improved my state of mind. With the brain scramble going on, I needed something physical to do. I needed to create not with my mind, but with my hands. It was so chaotic up there in my head, and I needed something that served as a walking meditation, something I could do silently without even thinking. I built a second Ikea Greenhouse Cabinet, this one for my office.
I started the long and tedious process of building a huge terrarium for some of my pickier plants. This one will be a work in progress for a while, but here’s a glimpse for now. I’m still working on finding some smaller plants as well as the process of sealing the cabinet more tightly, but I look forward to sharing more of this one once it’s finished.
And then, since I was on a roll, I gave my original Ikea Greenhouse Cabinet a makeover so the space can be used more efficiently.
It’s all a work in progress for me. My blog, my anxiety, me. There are some things I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, and some things I’m just following intuitively.
I would really love to hear from you about how you’re coping with winter 2020, the strangest season of the strangest year. Please comment below, send me an e-mail, or find me on Instagram so we can hash it out together.