2025-01-27

Restful days have been helpful. Although it took me a whole two days of doing nothing, I still woke up today with a headache. It almost took me out of work, at least in thought. All my doubts about my job and the people I work with came pouring in at the first moment I open up my laptop. I did search for jobs for a while but I gladly took myself out of it and started the week right.

I've always been the kind of person who does their own experiments using their body. It started when I became self-aware during my senior year in high school. Talked my adviser out of not caring about whether I graduate with honors or not because that was the time when I simply just wanted to abandon my straight-A academic kid for a life of just going with the flow. No history records to memorize, no equations to make sense of. I wanted to just exist and feel the world around me, which I felt I had been neglecting hiding behind textbooks.

After more than a decade, I have developed this sort of "understanding" about myself to the point where I plan when I must take coffee during the day, plot the time of crash, and adjust the things I must do before it happens so nothing gets ruined in the sequence of events that I had in my head. My dog should have her lunch meal prepped before I eat my lunch. I count the number of acceptable hours of sleep (at least 5 hours) before I decide to hit the sack. I estimate the amount of effort I will give to a person so I will always have the time for myself. This extends even to the closest family members. I count the hours when I should allow myself drink black tea after drinking my second cup of coffee. I estimate the events that I will have for the week to make room for the some spontaneous activities that I might be able to squeeze in if ever I get some free time.

It is an understatement when I say that I know what I want. I do not plan everything but I make sure that I will always perform the bare minimum that I expect from myself. Then I build a routine around those rules, with some attempts to make it flexible from time to time to make sure that it never gets old. I would switch a routine with another to see how it would affect me and my headspace. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, well now I know. Even if I can intuit things, I take pleasure in trying things even if I know that there is a chance that it will not work. Call it willful stupidity but the experience itself matters to me. I am able to imagine multiple outcomes but in my head, even if they are as realistic and predictable as they seem in my imagination, it is not real unless I am able to experience it. This is a kind of paradox that I have let myself experience. There is always a certain level of knowing, in understanding an event through experiencing it. A situation imagined can always be logically anticipated but it is within the realm of thought. What is always uncertain is how would I feel when I am faced with certain situations. How will I know that how I reacted in my imagination is the same way that I would when faced by its reality? How will I prove to myself that I can fulfil a promise even if it is just words that came out of my mouth? In the end, what matters to me is the result of an imagined outcome. And I need to be there when it happens.

This has been my recent musings about commitment has led me. I am going into this rabbit hole of self-knowledge about the drivers into how I make myself act using the purity of my own thoughts.

This is how I allow myself to say what I do and do as I say.