Hey UTCT community,
I haven’t been blogging much because I haven’t had too much to say from an honest place. I’ve been processing, working on some music, working on myself, working on my life, and watering Chéri Tree ENT. I know I’ve spoken to you guys, the UTCT community, about navigating my neurodivergence and what the new awareness has been like for me. Chances are, if you connect with me via social media, the mailing list, or the blog, you’re at least somewhat aware, especially if you’ve come to any recent UTCT event. So, I’ll openly share that I have been working on how to flow and let go of shame when hours and hours go by, day or night, and I’m not consistently accomplishing tasks the way that I want to.
Something that has helped, which I’ve learned from a friend or two, is that getting something done that day is much better than getting nothing done that day. Sometimes one day means one thing, and I know from my own experience that sometimes one or two days of nothing leads to one day of four things.
I was just having a hard time making progress. It doesn’t feel good to admit, but I get stuck in this rut of binge-watching, eating food, scrolling through social media, etc. I really need to research ADHD, Autism, and dopamine. I traced some of the possible influences that made it easy for me to get stuck this time, but possible influences aren’t always so easy to see, and the solution out of it can be even harder to figure out. So I was sitting, looking aimlessly at the list of tasks I’d written… I had a thought, and something hit me—I had an experience that made me want to write and share something that worked for me, even though I didn’t want to recommend it at all. I’ll explain why. It just happened, and I followed my gut to just get these thoughts out while fresh because maybe someone reading this could use it.
So let me get to it. I thought to myself, “Someone out there is going through something I can’t even imagine right now and is fighting their fight to get something done that they want to get done.” I felt humbled by that, and it activated me. I questioned that activation because I don’t like to guilt-trip or shame myself into motivation. But what if I’m not guilting myself? What if I’m actually empathizing with that other person and being moved by inspiration—by connecting my reality to something outside of my own and seeing a bigger picture?
At first, I thought it was about shaming and guilting myself into motivation. I think a lot of us have grown up with discipline or teachings about willpower that sounded a lot like guilting or shaming, encouraging us to compete or dehumanizing things that our brain and nervous systems were really doing, trying to force us to move a mountain without any real tools. I want to reframe it because I went through a process of not wanting to share this, thinking that even though it works for me, it didn’t necessarily align with my beliefs. But I realized that it wasn’t the guilt or shame part of me that this approach touched—it was the empathy part.
Being able to connect with the experiences of those with completely different experiences is so much of what this is about. It’s not always about uplifting one another; it’s just about lifting together, and part of that is carrying your OWN weight. I don’t want to just get off my behind because I “should” be able to due to a lack of certain struggles that someone else is facing. That has all the judgment that it feels like I have. Instead, someone else is facing their struggles, and I’m facing mine. If they are still doing it, let me find a way to get out of my head and into a headspace of empathy with them to face that part of the human experience.
I want to encourage you to pause and consider things from multiple perspectives when you find a thought or feeling that initially makes you uncomfortable. I know there’s a certain amount of delusion and fooling yourself that can occur from second-guessing and tainting your thoughts with coping mechanisms, escapism, narcissism, and a number of other things that it’s so easy and respected to deal with. I want you to remember that being grounded in compassion and empathy for yourself AND others creates a mirroring effect of good energy, curiosity, and love.
The truth is that finding your “Yielle” starts from within, in your own thoughts and internal dialogue with yourself. It’s about learning how to see through all those things (which takes awareness, acceptance, compassion, and openness) and being willing to examine from different perspectives in order to find truth.
