There are times where if I cook, I will burn something.
It's a state of mind resulting from of being frustrated about something followed by focusing on compensating to work around it to a degree that I can't focus on the original task anymore. Everything which requires any amount of judgment or focus gets affected, cooking is just the most visceral example.
I used to believe if I set rules for myself like "stir every 15 seconds" and "turn off stove after 4 minutes", I could work around it. Even in that headspace, I can follow basic guidelines. It won't result in good food, but it should be unburnt and edible enough.
In theory, at least.
In practice, it doesn't matter.
If I'm that frustrated, I'll do everything sloppily, I won't have the capacity to recover from any mistakes or minor circumstance, and things will burn. Then I'll still be frustrated, but also angrily munching on burned food before inevitably concluding that forcing myself to eat it will only make things worse.
Eventually, I learned to avoid cooking when that happens.
Eat snacks, drink water, fail to throw the wrappers into the trash can instead of failing to cook things with sharp objects and fire. The only thing worth doing at that point is getting myself out of that headspace, not giving in to the urge to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the object of frustration until it relents.
Most of the time, that means stopping.
I have a couple guidelines for myself that I follow even when I don't believe them. Heuristics to avoid making poor decisions when I know I'm not in a good headspace.
One of them is to invest more time and energy into things, even if it doesn't feel like progress is being made. Everything seems awful at some point while you're working on it, doubly so for creative pursuits. There are fantastic projects I'm glad for which only happened through because I trusted that rule through thick and thin.
Keep moving forward.
Trust the process.
This is the exception. Something to avoid the opposite extreme, where more effort feels like the only solution even though it's actively harmful. I can't articulate how I know the difference between "it feels like nothing is getting done" and "nothing is getting done", but it is very obvious.
The world doesn't have to monotonically improve.
You can always make things worse.
If you're lucky, you can revert whatever you did and you've only wasted the time which would have been wasted no matter what you did. If you're unlucky, you'll spend hours cleaning up the mess just to get back to where you started.
On my worst days, the frustration and need to "just fix it" gets so strong I can't even attempt to do anything else, even knowing I'll just make more work for myself if I try. In that state, when nothing else can be done, doing nothing is the only correct choice. It doesn't have to be literally nothing, though staring into space and sleeping come quite close. Usually I go outside to get fresh air and burn the energy by moving, which feels like nothing but is objectively something.
It's the feeling of nothing that counts. The fact that I can't screw it up.
I've lost too many times to keep spinning the wheel.
Whether this is common sense or radical really depends on who you get your life advice from. I've been on both sides at different times. This is how I've split the difference.
You'll have to find the balance on your own.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
There's a prolonged version of this state which is less intense but drags down everything I do. I think other people call it called burnout, or possibly depression.
I'm still going to call it "days when I can't cook", even though I can actually cook (badly) on those days, because that's what makes sense to me. I wonder how much of the thinking I've done about myself is coming to pre-established conclusions under different names.
The more I write the more certain I am of who I am, and the less certain I am of everyone else.
By the way, I'm doing alright.
Feeling more contemplative than normal today, that's all. Back to your regularly scheduled mundane practical advice tomorrow. Maybe color coding, that's always fun.
I hope you do something fun today,
- Rew