Found this old essay from February of 2022. This was previously locked to Patreon subscibers, but when I unearthed it I realized it captured a turning point in my life that felt deeply relevant to the current time period, too. This was about the time I quit drinking and started changing a number of inputs in order to reboot my life. I have since, of course, finished my book, leveled up my day job, and dug out of the pit that was my llife. But here, in this moment: I didn’t know if I when any of it would work. I only knew the way I was living wasn’t sustainable. Maybe you’ve felt this way too.
FEBRUARY 10, 2022
One of the challenges of writing pep talks for other people in the form of essays is that I myself have been struggling to find footing in this strange timeline we’re in. I have a sense of being unmoored.
While 2020 seemed to drag on for five years, 2021 felt like a blip, a lost year, and here we are, halfway through February of 2022 and I have no idea where the last two years have gone. They seem to have been eaten by garden projects, day job churn, and a recursive writing process in which I seem to be writing the same 30,000 words of a book over and over.
The time loop has created a weird sense of dissonance for me, which is probably why I enjoyed THE GONE WORLD so much. This is an incredible time travel detective thriller featuring quantum futures and time loops and I felt that shit so hard. There’s been much said about those of us who started writing time travel novels after the 2016 U.S. election (THE GONE WORLD came out in 2018). Many of continue to process this sense of being adrift in time. I find myself reading news about the U.S. deploying troops to Europe ahead of a possible invasion of the Ukraine, and Russia and China aligning themselves, and it feels so much like time is a circle, like I’m reliving a conflict from nearly a hundred years ago.
This sense may simply be a result of growing older, of seeing patterns repeat for a few decades in succession. But it is a frustrating sense, the knowledge that we seem to be making the same mistakes, treading the same ground, with little incremental progress. Humanity keeps working against its own best interests. Perhaps we are wired to self-correct when tensions become too high, populations too large to support, obliterating ourselves to more reasonable levels.
It’s a mystery.
And yet I don’t believe any of this time looping is necessary or inevitable. It’s simply…easier. Easier to step into established patterns. Breaking time loops is possible. Goodness knows those are my favorite time travel tropes. To do so, however, takes bold choices and great leaps forward. I don’t believe time loops can be broken through incremental change, not anymore. We must be ripped bodily from them, left unmoored.
I am been dissatisfied with my life the last few years, feeling caught in my own personal loop of grinding sameness, routine, self-loathing. When one is confined to the same few blocks for weeks and months on end, it’s easy feel as if time is meaningless. There is no waypoint to differentiate one span from another. I took advantage of my job layoff to re-organize my life and routines during the two-week break before I started a new job. That was the biggest shakeup to my routine over the two years of pandemic, and making those changes – getting up earlier, getting showered and dressed and walking in the garden before work – were change enough to yank me out of some of my worst habits. Re-organizing my space also helped. I changed up my office setup and deep cleaned it. This weekend, I’ll be deep cleaning the house. I need a fresh start. A clean slate.
To change one’s habits requires changing more than one or two inputs, I’ve found. To change one’s habits requires, for me, tweaking a series of at least ten inputs.
As I work through that list today, I am heartened by the fact that yes, I can change. I have changed before. Changed my life dramatically. But to do that required me to step outside of my comfort zone. To challenge myself. To do hard things. And it’s been a long time since I challenged myself to do hard things.
The crushing weight of middle age and the pandemic and political upheaval has generated an overwhelming anxiety and sense of impending doom that has been difficult to break. Yet I have done it before. I can do it again. I see old photos of myself and I think, “I was able to do that once.” I may not ever be that person again (I wouldn’t want to) but there are qualities I liked about that person, one who was not so wracked with anxiety. One who saw doors as possibilities instead of different paths to death.
We are all of us on a journey, one that ends the same for all of us. All we have to decide, as is often said, is the time we spend between then and now.
And so I am working toward breaking my own time loop, my established patterns, the anxiety-inducing rat maze I have created these last two or three years.
I know it is possible.
It takes only a great leap of faith.
