Ep. 2 Motivation is a whore, and discipline is the madam

Dear Ana,

There is no way for a change to be made while I keep waking up in something that’s more of a monument to fucking depression rather than an actual home.

Only thing I have more of than filth, in my apartment, is excuses for why it’s still there. Motivation was an absentee parent throughout my youth and even that, after enough abuse, morphed into a resentful child once I turned into a young adult. Whatever was left of my motivation, by the time I hit my early twenties, would go on to dissolve in the following decade of hedonism.

I’ve been the darling-bitch of disappointment just as much as you’ve been the pimp of your own cheap ass excuses, Ana. You know very well the questions I keep banging my head against most nights, the ones that seem like a 2 ton opium addicted sloth weighing me down:

“Why didn’t I do it today? Eh.. It’s fine, can’t be too hard on myself. I’ll do it tomorrow. I was too tired today. I was too busy telling myself I’d do the other shit until nothing got done. I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll wake up fresh and early. Start over. Brand new day, right? Today’s already too fuckedup to do anything… It’s too late to fix today but I’ll fix everything tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

….

“Will I do it tomorrow…?”

And, in turn, I’m quite familiar with your days, weeks, and months even, spent laying in bed; Your eyes nailed to whichever screen that can twitch away your attention from the fact that you haven’t showered in almost a week or that the food you’ve been lately eating would make a dusty old boot seem like an organic meal.

Tell me how familiar this sounds to you, Ana: You fall asleep after a disappointing day, hoping you’ll start the next one better and finally get something done. You wake up and, as always, you’ve slept in. It’s the early hours of the afternoon but the better part of the day has already come and gone. You feel terrible. What point is there to even get up and try to force some fucking productivity into what’s left of this random Wednesday? It’s too late to keep your word to yourself so why not just spend whatever is left of this day to do absolutely fuck-all?

Motivation is a whore and discipline is the madam. Even with something as trivial as cleaning, I’ve danced around doing it for weeks on end but I’ve had it up to my bony ass with this shit, Ana. No more.

I did it differently today. No more waiting around for excuses to show up.

No detergent or cleaner? No problem, I’ll just use the soap. Don’t have a clean, fresh sponge? I’ll rip up a shirt and use the pieces as rags. I woke at 8 in the fuckin evening? Who cares, I’ll just clean into the early hours of the morning.

And le’me tell you something, Ana: my apartment looked like Mordor if you’d give Steve-o the keys to the kingdom.

There was a seedling, the size of a fucking arm, growing out of the kitchen sink, yet — somehow — I still had more mouldy pieces of gelatinous food in the fridge than there. Floorboards sticky with liqueur and dog fur, the monotony of a slimy deathscape broken up by empty bottles littered throughout the place.

So I got to work.

The more dishes I scraped clean the more I started to notice everything else that needed cleaning or fixing. Every nook and cranny of the place just seemed desperate for attention. And that’s when a small sliver of motivation festers into defeat, once you come to terms with the herculean effort you’d need to fix everything. This need to FIX EVERYTHING, to get it out of sight so I don’t have to stare at the constant reminder of what I am. This is the “need” that strangles the compassion out of you. The same compassion that you’d need to show yourself.

As I went on with the task at hand the absurd futility of it just seemed to eclipse whatever progress I made. There was no way I could fix all this, no way I could make it clean and perfect. Too much to do and and the childish resistance, to it, too strong. But I went on and on and on, doing my best to keep my mind on what I had in my hands instead of the myriad other things that still needed doing.

Every sweep of the broom had me saying “Just one more. Another one. Don’t stop. Keep going.” Like some college freshman worried her fratboy would come quicker than dear uncle’s subscription to her laundry basket. Always on the brink of it all coming to an end but not quite. Not today. Today I did the essentials, I did whatever was needed to make me feel better about myself. Not what others expect, not what would be normal for a regular ass adult.

With enough of the “essentials” done I actually had it in me for the piece de resistance: the stove. Fuck me, man, the way this stove looked I’d have had more success cooking something in the damn ocean. But I did it. Ana, I did the stove. I did the fucking stove, Ana! Can you fucking believe it?

I know you struggle with motivation, Ana. As do I. We try, try and fuckin’ try again but always end up disappointing ourselves with a task too large to handle. I mean who are we kidding here, really? We can’t fix EVERYTHING, Ana. We just can’t… And that’s okay.

So I sit in an apartment that’s been cleaned, upgraded even: from something that resembled the unwashed, shit riddled boxer shorts of a meth-head into the odorous abode of an alcoholic. I mean… It’s not perfect, it’s not completely fixed, but it’s progress, right?

It’s better than what I had yesterday and most any day before that. Of course it’s not up to a “normal” person’s standards but hey, normal people don’t grow up licking the paint off the wall.

And that’s what finally shifted in me. I’m done trying to make everything perfect, I’m done trying to do it like normal people do and I’m definitely done comparing myself to people that don’t have an existential crisis when xmas cleaning comes around.

I don’t have to make everything perfect, Ana, and neither do you. We just need to make things a little better, and that we can do.