Malaise

When you lose your motive and your joy...

It’s been a while since I’ve connected with you, and for that, I apologize. For the first time in many years, I’ve been feeling “stuck” as a writer. While my goal is to publish weekly, I also have the goal of not publishing anything that sucks! I usually have several writing projects going at once, so if one isn’t flowing, I can move to another. This time, I was hitting the wall on everything.

When we lose the rhythm of our days there are usually circumstantial explanations. It’s important to note those circumstances. Sometimes they are legitimate reasons, and we need to cut ourselves some slack. (I had a few of those, including a bout of Covid and a long lingering after effect.)

“Reasons” can also be cleverly disguised excuses. The trick is to discern one from the other. For me, it’s an excuse if it involves blaming something or someone else, wanting to avoid responsibility, and/or ignoring my own agency to act.

I never considered quitting. I have lots of practice with navigating obstacles, so finding a few rocks in the road was no reason to abandon the journey. I believe it was Robert Frost who said, “The only way out is through.” I kept writing, although it was not writing I cared to share with anyone.

I’ve been writing for publication for almost forty years. So these internal roadblocks are familiar, but always unsettling. I’ve been stuck before, and I know it will pass (in fact, it’s already receded). So it seemed like a good time to make use my malaise as a case study for how we can all navigate one of the predictable waypoints on the journey from now to next.

What do you do when you wake up and realized that those things that have brought you pleasure and satisfaction for years are no longer fulfilling? This feeling, which we’ll call malaise for now, is often the preceding event behind our decisions—some inconsequential, others momentous.

It might be a relatively insignificant malaise—a hobby that no longer fulfills, social relationships that no longer serve you.

Perhaps it’s something more significant—you’re losing hope in a career or a marriage. The place you live no longer inspires or provides a good context for joy. Maybe your heart has been elsewhere for a while and it’s time to resolve the dissonance, one way or another.

A good starting point for working through a season of stuckness or internal discontent?

“Don’t believe everything you think or feel.”

I’ve learned the hard way that my thoughts and emotions aren’t one hundred percent reliable! But I also know the consequence of ignoring those feelings. Deprived of time and attention, those thoughts and emotions can devolve into something darker, with damaging consequences.

I was careful not to catastrophize my dry spell. Thoughts like, “I’ll never write again,” or “I was an imposter all along,” aren’t going to get me over the hump. But they could well cause me to walk away from something important without sufficient reason.

This uncharacteristic struggle with writing made it important to ask myself some hard questions, then journal until I found resolution.

Do I need a break?

For a while I’ve been planning a solo road trip across New Mexico, where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence. I enjoyed reconnecting with a few old friends, seeing familiar landscapes, and reflecting on some significant events that profoundly shaped me. All of these fed my soul.

Another, unexpected benefit was it got me away from all the screens for a while. I never turned on a television, didn’t take a computer or iPad, and only used my phone to check in at home once a day and serve as a GPS. I needed to break the insidious hold that we all wrestle with in this age of instant access to everything. And yet a “screen fast” wasn’t all I needed.

Am I bored?

Whether it’s in a marriage, a career, or a recreational outlet, boredom often comes from doing the same old thing the same old way over and over again.

· Am I bored with the work of Second Rodeo? Not at all.

· Am I bored with my routine? Yeah, a little. But that’s easily fixed.

· Am I bored with my clients? No. People often show up with similar challenges, but the solutions are intensely personal and infinitely varied. That’s a big part of the appeal for me, guiding clients as they suss out their unique solutions.

So now I needed to examine the flip side of the question.

Why am I not bored? I can think of two words that, for me, keep boredom at bay. Curiosity and Mindfulness.

Boredom comes when we quit paying attention. Curiosity means I choose to engage again without knowing what I’ll find. When I lose focus, I lean in and pay closer attention. That’s my non-woo woo definition of mindfulness—I’m paying attention to the previously neglected details of what is right before me.

I had a coaching client who was bored in the corporate role he’d held for over a decade. To help him regain his focus, I asked him to start paying attention to all had changed in his role over those years—policies, procedures, people, the markets they served, etc. For him, the simple action of paying attention broke the cycle. He was able to identify some areas of neglect.

“I’m a problem solver at heart. I was bored because I thought I was out of problems to solve. Wrong. I’d only solved the easy-to-spot problems. Once I started re-examining my scope of responsibility, I found enough problems to keep me engaged for another ten years!”

Are you exhausted?

It didn’t take me long to realize fatigue was a root cause of my feelings of stuckness. It wasn’t obvious at first. It wasn’t an “I’m exhausted,” kind of fatigue. Fatigue might be physical, but it can also be mental, emotional, spiritual, social, or creative. That means that the antidote needs to be specific to the root cause(s). My fatigue was mostly mental and creative.

There’s a certain type of anxiety that self-employed people must navigate. No work, no pay. Every engagement feels like it could be your last.

While I’ve largely moved beyond that anxiety, some of the habits I formed when it was real are still with me. Flexibility is a benefit of being self-employed, but I had mingled work and non-work a little too much. There weren’t enough days of full disengagement and rest. Conversely, I wasn’t always fully engaged when I was working. I was lacking what poet David Whyte calls “wholeheartedness.”

Now that I see it, I’ve already taken steps to address it.

Okay, that was a lot about me, but hopefully it gives you both the eyes to see and the courage to address your own areas of malaise. If you’re comfortable, share with us in the comments how you’re dealing with it. Someone else in our community might have words of encouragement or direction.

As always, feel free to reach out if you’d like support. And no matter where you are, enjoy the journey!