I haven't felt like writing for a while. Yet here I still am, sitting behind the desk in a pair of shorts, a band T-shirt (Abbath, if you please), a Call of Duty: Ghosts hoodie we found in a second-hander once, and a flat cap, backwards like a douchebag or a child would wear it... freezing (it's 19°C, can't be asked to turn the floor heating back on after a power outgage which I have half a post of written about in draft) and hungry... trying to squeeze out this damn post.
Where has the motivation gone?
I feel as if my brain has closed itself in and is not letting any thoughts flow in or out. Sometimes it's the opposite - it wrenches a bunch of thoughts at me all at once, which is kind of a blessing but not always.
I have around 10 posts in draft, under construction in my HackMD*, but I can't come to finish even one of them. Sometimes I get new ideas. If I'm lucky enough, they'll turn into a fully-functioning post right away, if not, they'll add to the draft list.
I have pushed myself into so many projects and some of them I haven't even dealt with yet but I already feel overwhelmed. There are SO MANY things I want to do and experience but I just... can't get myself to (do) them.
Projects, you say?
Yeah, I've messed myself into quite a lot of different projects over these past months and I don't want to say ''NO'' to them, either, because they're all so interesting, attractive and challenging! Some of them are connected to the well-being of communities, some keep me more concentrated on myself.
Estonian Steem Team: Curation
First of all, me and a couple of other people from the Estonian Steemit community got fed up with how a lot of people were posting memes and very little made quality content, so we thought about making a curation account / trail to encourage people to post better things than memes on Steemit. At the moment it already autovotes on a couple of people about 20 minutes after they've published their posts.
The account will soon also feature Steemit guides in Estonian (I've currently written at least 8 of them which are waiting to be looked at by the others and hopefully have something added by them).
I'll make a longer post about it in the future after its intro posts have been published.
MinnowBooster Whitelist
(https://minnowbooster.net). Not long ago I was added to the MinnowBooster's Whitelist, which is a community-chosen list of people whose posts are worthy of a chance of boosting their pieces with higher upvotes.
To be accepted to the Whitelist, one has to first get an invite by someone who's already in; then go through an evaluation process where 5 other Whitelist members have a look at their blog and posts and decide whether to Accept or Reject them. Last but not least the final decision will be made by an admin of MinnowBooster.
Every time a Whitelisted user buys an upvote through MinnowBooster, the person who invited them in the first place gets 1% and the people who evaluated them positively get 0.3% of the paid SBD in their MinnowBooster balance.
I've already spent some days on evaluating a lot of people and inviting some I know write posts of great quality but I've also looked through a lot of people who make deciding hard - I just leave them unevaluated and hope someone else does the job for me.
A Comic Strip
One day when writing an Estonian guide on how to make an account on Steemit, I made myself an alternative account mainly to get some screenshots for the guide but also for in case I come up with some kind of a project and don't want to spam my main account with it.
(https://steemit.com/comic/@xves/xves-s-sandbox-1-or-or-the-markets-vol-1). It stood empty for some time until this one thought had been stuck in my mind for a while: one of my acquaintance had messaged me on Facebook one day saying she saw a dream where Cyanide & Happiness had shared my comic strip on their Facebook page. I didn't have a comic strip then nor any idea of what kind of a comic strip to make but I liked the idea of making one.
Another thing that was stuck in my head for a while was this tiny bunch of grass I had drawn in an illustration under one of my dream journal posts. When I say tiny, I mean reaaallly tiny! You have to zoom in to see it. Anyway, it resembled me of some kind of a creature more than a bunch of grass and I felt as if it needed to have a life of its own. And so... @xves was born!
Self-Developement (Journal)
Last but not least, I've come to the conclusion: If I don't want to die a self-despising loser, I have to get my shit together and do something about it.
Over the last 6 years I've had a drastic loss of motivation. It's not just ''ahh, I'm too lazy to go to school / work / outside or do homework or chores...'', it's way worse. I need to motivate myself to do the simplest things like brush my teeth or make myself something to eat. Here's where the journal comes in.
As most of today's teenage girls, I too had a phase where I used the microblogging social network tumblr every day. I even got my snail-mail loving bookworm of a friend to join and use it. One day I started seeing her reblog different kinds of photos of peoples journals which looked really neat and nicely decorated. They used them for all kinds of different purposes - bucket lists, logging their everyday mood, making notes, sketching, food recipes and motivation. I'm thinking of starting a self-developement journal of my own and I'm hoping to strictly devote myself to it.
Conclusion / TL;DR
I'm going through a motivational crisis that has lasted for about 6 years and now it's time to do shit.
I have a lot of projects on my shoulders - some more community-centered, some a little more egoistic - and I do not want to say ''NO'' to any of them. However, I've decided I should make one of them a higher priority than others and strictly devote myself to it. I'm talking about a self-developement journal.
This means my posting schedule will be either as unstable as it has been so far or turn even more unstable for a while... well, at least until I get some things going with the whole journal thing.
I hope you guys understand and won't judge me too hard. Even if you do... fuck you, it's my life!
Have you kept a journal of similar purpose? If so, how did it go?
PS! I'm not freezing anymore (+ this post took hours).