Tag Archives: unmotivated

Nowhere Man

The Beatle’s song “Nowhere Man” came to mind as I was beginning to write this post. I feel exactly like I’m making all my “nowhere plans for nobody”. I actually often create problems with scheduling at home because I make all these stupid plans in my head and it seems all decided but then I forget to tell anyone about them.

I’ve been feeling somewhat lost this week. We had my daughter’s 6th birthday party on Saturday which was fine. Nothing particularly bad has happened since, but I just feel so ungrounded and unmotivated. For example, I’ve been trying to write up a paper on some research I did but I’ve just had the hardest time doing it. It feels like I can’t wrap my mind around what I am trying to say and that I get bogged down in small grammar details, and nothing flows or makes any sense. Trying to dig up citations seems to be such a huge task for some reason. I escape by working on the figures, which for me is much more straightforward and fun to do. It’s funny, I can do a decent job editing other people’s writing but writing my own stuff is usually such an overwhelming task.

Today this inability to act or do came up at my daughter’s school. She left her backpack in the cafeteria by accident yesterday and my wife had asked me to look for it this morning when I dropped her off. I checked the lost and found, but when it wasn’t there I kind of gave up. I’m still not sure why, but the idea of having to go sign in and find the cafeteria(I still don’t fully understand my way around the school) then take the backpack back to the classroom seemed too hard. Writing about it seems ridiculous, but I just couldn’t do it. The secretary is kind of mean, but so what? All I had to do was explain that I needed to look for my daughter’s backpack and be on my way.

When I told my wife she was somewhat incredulous that I didn’t do it and was annoyed because it meant she would have to go after school with both kids to find it. She didn’t yell or anything, and given the circumstances was quite gracious and calm about it. I tend to cut myself down when I’m upset about my behavior but she was patient enough to ask me to stop insulting myself and listen to why it had inconvenienced her so much. I grudgingly listened and realized that I had made things difficult, apologized and still felt like shit. The rest of the day I’ve been off, questioning my ability to do anything in life, feeling like I’ve reached my peak in income and career and everything from here on out will be downhill. I feel like I’m too dumb or unmotivated to learn anything new that requires mental ability. I’m also beginning to get worried because my usual excitement for doing stuff like surfing is also beginning to diminish. I haven’t had the opportunity to surf since vacation, and the conditions haven’t been good anyhow but I’ll have to keep an eye on this.

To focus on the positives (since there are so many negatives I could go off about), I did make some progress on some ongoing projects I’ve fallen behind on. I complied the list of replacement parts for a receiver I am fixing for a friend (this had been seeming impossible for weeks now) and am waiting for confirmation to order the parts. My other accomplishment this week was posting the vacation pictures online for family members. I also got around to printing some B&W photos (one of which I posted above) which I haven’t done for months. Unfortunately, these actions didn’t pick me up as much as taking care of unfinished business usually does.

I’ll try to focus on the rest of Nowhere Man, and hope that I am not completely hopeless and just viewing life through an extremely distorted lens.