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Core Ideas

  1. Task completion takes precedence over my mental and physical health.
  2. I engage in actively self-destructive behaviors, like emotional eating, to feel alive and dull the pain, while I continue working on tasks.
  3. Things are not helped by engaging in project initiatives spanning years, and where far too much of the time is spent lost in emotionally sterile, often highly technical, weeds.
  4. Part of me knows my perspective and pattern of behavior is insane, and yet at the same time, another part of me believes it is necessary and inevitable...

(See also “Fracturing”.)

More Detail

I am becoming more and more aware that at some level I put task-completion at a higher priority than my own mental and physical health. In a more extreme phrasing: My survival as an organism is put as subservient to my todo list.

This is true whether the tasks are externally-generated (say meeting the needs of a client) or entirely self-generated, arising from work on a project whose completion I care deeply about (like this creation, δroplets).

 

To be more gritty and experiential: It is a frequent experience to find my mind screaming at me that I have been in the technical, emotionally sterile weeds far too long and that I need to feel something (and to simply rest my head and heart). Similarly, my body is screaming at me to move — to run, cycle, dance — again in order to feel something.

Far too often, instead of responding to these obvious cries in a healthy manner — exercising, having a deep emotionally connective conversation — I subconsciously (sometimes even consciously...) say to myself that the task at hand is only 1% complete and that that is what matters, that is the priority. And so (for example) I grab a box of , whose ongoing consumption makes me feel alive at a visceral, moment-to-moment, animal level and allows me to "stand" continuing to sit in front of the computer (or similar) for additional minutes, hours, days, weeks — lifetime...

 

A current goal: To truly, genuinely, with creativity and kindness, ask myself the question "How can I make progress on this task, no matter how long it takes, without becoming collateral damage in the process?
(My longtime S.O./girlfriend suggests the right question to ask, more ambitious, is how to have fun with everything, whether work related, a health concern, etc. I have been working on that, including handing out fun Squirrel++ postcards at recent medical appointments. 🙂 )

Additional thoughts, caveats, references, etc.

  • A position of privilege?

      I am aware that even entertaining the question of "how I am feeling" might be considered by some a "First-World, Upper-Middle-Class Luxury". I find that perspective understandable — indeed part of me feels that way, but another, larger, part does not. More specifically:

    • As a past said to me (roughly): People's pain is their pain. "Comparing" psychic pain levels between individuals is neither kind nor helpful nor particularly meaningful.
    • Considering as a statement of (among other things) unbearable psychic pain, then being "of privilege" is hardly protection. (Just consider the student suicide rates at Harvard, MIT, and UMass, or within the physician population, whose numbers exceed even those within the military.)
  • In many areas, my . So while I feel that my mental and physical health depends on not making myself subservient to the task, another part of me feels I must make myself subservient in order to survive on the business/financial front. In other words, I find my very survival in area A in (direct?) conflict with my survival in area B... This is not good. (More potentially to follow as I continue to struggle with this issue.)
  • I can at times have "perfectionist" tendencies — or maybe it would be more accurate to say "I want to be proud of my creations" tendencies. This can exacerbate things...
  • It is easy, looking back at my childhood, to see how I might have arrived at this ordering of priorities. But detailing that is for another post (or addition to this one down the line).