Postponing

I originally wrote this last year, and has gone through some light tweaks each time I revisited it. I wrote this during that limbo period of being unemployed I spent weeks idly sitting around shifting between enthusiastically hatching a plan of being productive for the day to being paralyzed at the idea of doing something. The weeks went by much faster that way, with the guilty conscience that they were being wasted. It was within that period where I was non-committedly looking for job openings and citing a plethora of reasons in my head why I shouldn’t apply. It’s not safe yet. Can I work from home? How far is their office anyway? This sounds shady, what if it’s a sham and I just duped myself because I was in a rush.

And yet despite all my rationalization and how valid some of them were, I knew that those all of those reasons were secondary—a believable façade when someone asks why haven’t you found a job yet? not that anyone would really ask that. I was pre-emptively justifying my job-hunting delays.

But that’s not really what the piece is about. No, that bit was only the catalyst that gradually made its presence more known as the months went on and lead to the real reason behind the piece.

The piece was about my smallness; the anxiety of my inadequacy. I had brief bouts of enthusiasm (normally after I’ve had my morning coffee), teeming with seemingly-attainable possibility and the motivation to pursue them, until that motivation gradually expended its juice until I’ve mellowed back into a bore.

I found myself having less and less to become into, and was overly-attached to the nostalgia of my former self, but even that corroded itself into a reminder that I was slowly becoming a far cry of that version of Carlos.

It’s true what they say, how the past keeps getting brighter every time, even the grim parts don’t seem all that grim.

I found myself going back and forth to talking to someone and just telling them outright I was feeling unhappy, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Out of embarrassment or losing the reasons to elaborate why I felt that way, I held it off and focused on every other menial task I could find and stretch as far as I could to make it seem like a day well-spent, but even that had its limits. Eventually, I found myself back in the same rut as before, sometimes sinking deeper with the idea that this is what I might ever be: stuck.

But fortunately, that’s all in the past now. I’m in a much better headspace and I don’t find myself caught in my own overthinking as much as before. Like I could actually read longer pages and finish books now! I’m able to speak a little more openly about my own thoughts now, too (this substack being the most glaring proof). While my voice still feels reserved a lot of the times, it’s a step in the right direction. So I owe it all to you, friends who are reading this now, and to the constants in my life. Thank you.

So this post is a retrospect, a final shout into the void of that time, and a way of saying yeah, i’m getting there, again.