Giants in my head.
Time to find some stones.
Quick note before you begin to read: I recommend scrolling down and playing the linked song while you scroll through this week’s journal. Enjoy! - J
It takes about half an hour to get from my house to work. After a few weeks of fine-tuning, I’ve got the timing down to a science. The train comes every ten minutes on the ten, so in order to catch it without waiting unnecessarily on the platform, I need to make sure I’m headed downstairs and putting my shoes on by five past. I close the front door of my house behind me and walk to the station, through the doorway, down two flights of stairs and stand and wait on a particular manhole cover on the platform. After getting in the train car and (hopefully) finding a seat for the fifteen minute train ride to the station nearest to my work, the train doors open exactly opposite the stairway I descend from the platform. I turn right to exit the station and start the ten minute walk to work, j-walking across one street and then crossing two more at the pedestrian light. I send my parents a daily life-update voice-note on the way. I walk through the front door of the furniture shop at five-to, just enough time to walk around and say hello to my colleagues before picking up my key and heading across the courtyard to unlock the warehouse and unpack my stuff into the corner I’ve transformed into my studio.
My perfect system fell apart on Thursday. On my way to work, the train I took wasn’t going all the way to my final stop. I, along with all of my fellow passengers, had to take the first train two stops, alight, switch platforms and wait ten minutes for the successive train going in the right direction. Four different train lines usually serve this route resulting in a maximum wait time of about three or four minutes. On Thursday morning, on of the signals had broken down and the same volume of passengers that would usually have been served by four trains now only had one available. It came every twenty minutes. The result was a pungent train car bursting at the seams, its passengers either annoyed at the public transport services or anxious about being late. Aside from any children, who were thrilled to delay their trips.
I’ve been discussing my current mental framework for a while now with my friends and my parents and my girlfriend and you, my dear readers. I am in an anxious place. One I have been in before. I obsessively check if what I am doing is right. Not morally so much as in accordance with certain performance expectations. If I listen to music on the train, once I get off and walk to work, I think: damn, I should have listened to an audio book. If I listen to an audiobook, afterwards I think: damn, I should have responded to my WhatsApp messages. If I do that, I think I should have journalled. This happens during my free time. It happens at work. For the last month or so, I’ve been particularly bad about performing constant self-evaluation checks. Have I done that right? I seem to retrospectively rank the activities I do and could have done on a list and only if it seems to me that the choice I made was the best one, am I satisfied (this never happens). Trying to make myself proud has really been stressing me out. I grind my teeth at night, now. I don’t want that. I’ve created an internal hostile workplace. I’m going to quit and find another head to live in.
I’ve been trying to move away from the psychological autocracy I’ve got going on. Instead of reading or journalling or running a fortune five hundred company while I was stuck on that stinky train, I was listening to this song, “David” by Newcomers Club. Instead of freaking about about getting to work late and my perfect system being destroyed (grappling with control issues is also on my internal governing body’s agenda), I listened to my song. I tried not to question if it was the right decision and tried, instead to enjoy the decision I had made. I closed my eyes and felt my body swaying with the carriage. I let my body hang by the arm that held the hand rail above me. I felt the wind blowing on my face through an open window and delighted in the harmony and clarity of the vocals in my song. I smiled. I listened to my song on repeat, eyes closed, all the way to work.
I find it interesting that I ask myself if I’ve done something correctly instead of well; as if there is only one way to do anything. If you enjoyed this journal, please consider subscribing.
P.S. Here’s a great excerpt from the lyrics of “David”:
♪ If I can’t cast away the giants in my head, I'll just sit back and cast a line ♫