Something hasn’t felt quite right for the last several weeks. Life has felt especially hard, which I know is difficult to believe for those of you who subscribe to the notion that there’s “Wittchen Good Fortune.” (I know you’re out there.) But really, it’s been like the universe has been conspiring to make things trickier than usual. I don’t expect things to be easy–in fact, I often find myself falling prey to the spurious notion that if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing (see also: why I went to engineering school)–but I do believe that if things become too hard, they may not be meant to be. (It’s a weird dichotomy of thought, I know.) I’ve been having trouble focusing and motivating myself to do almost anything, and several initiatives I’m involved in seem to be going through rough patches. I feel like I haven’t been doing enough, and then I’m not entirely sure what I should be doing. I’ve been feeling paralyzed by the fact that I have so many projects that I want to start, but only a small handful of them offer an immediate financial benefit. In short, I’ve been lost.
It all came to a head last week when I did something supremely stupid–I deleted my website. (Yes, this one.) It’s a long, technical and boring story how I did it, but for someone who self-identifies as being meticulous and careful, it was a real blow to my ego. Right in front of me was the electronic manifestation of how I’d been feeling but couldn’t put a finger on. Not only was I metaphorically lost, but now a big part of my electronic life was literally, well, lost. I wanted to throw up.
I’ve gone through these directionless periods before, and almost always there’s a little signpost along the way that tells me that I need to do something different. The signpost usually comes in the form of doing something that’s uncharacteristic for me–something that challenges one of my own internal stories. You know the stories–the ones we tell ourselves about who we are, who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to feel and act. Sometimes those stories are helpful guides for how to live our lives and other times they’re just…stories.