Doing Something When I Feel Like Doing Nothing

Some days I wake up, dress, step effortlessly into the flow of the day, and find myself at the end of it with a happy list of accomplishments. Some days, and today was one of those, I get up and just never really get going. I don’t feel energetic or purposeful or motivated to do much of anything. I rarely do literally nothing, but what I do do feels like treading water.

Today I met with the homeschooling son for our hour, I cleaned the kitchen, and then…

…I read a novel. It was very well written and it is due back at the library, but the whole time I was reading I was aware I was letting the best hours of my day go past with little to show for them. And I didn’t care enough to put the book aside and do something else. I didn’t feel well – joints and digestive system both conspiring against me – so I knew I probably needed a slow day, but I never mentally resigned myself to it, so I didn’t enjoy doing not much of anything. In the afternoon, I asked an Adolescent Male to sort and wash a couple of loads of laundry, which I subsequently folded, so we won’t get impossibly behind there. We have plenty of leftovers for supper, so that’s fine. The house is reasonably tidy, so that’s no problem. But I’d meant to do a job for somebody I help out now and then and I just never did force myself to get started. I also spent the day dreading borough council meeting tonight, which I can see I’m not really well enough to attend, so that feels like another way of letting others down and also wasting my energy all day not wanting to do something I finally end up acknowledging I’m not going to do.

That’s the worst thing about this sort of day – the waste of mental and emotional energy spent feeling bad about not doing good. That’s it. That’s what I hate.

The only fix I know is to either decide early that I’m taking the day off or to salvage my self-respect by forcing myself to start doing something positive, if only something small and if only for a few minutes, and hope it leads to more. This afternoon I talked myself into peeling a bunch of too-ripe bananas and dumping them into the mixer bowl so I’d have to keep going and make some muffins to prevent them turning even darker and getting gross and being a waste. I really didn’t want to bake. I really didn’t want to have to wash the dishes I would dirty by baking. Peeling that fruit got me started, though, and then of course it didn’t take that much time to follow through.

I meant to write a blog post today, too, and here I am at the end of the afternoon jollying myself into getting something, anything, down. I cannot say I have done it with pleasure or enthusiasm, but I feel better now than I would have if I’d have neither gone ahead and given myself permission not to write today nor made myself do at least a little.

Do you have times like this? What do you do to help yourself out of them?