My fixations are powerful, but they can also be maddeningly ephemeral and fleeting. And I hate that; about them and, honestly, about myself. But I’ve never really asked why I feel that way...
I'll commit immense amounts of time and energy and even money to a fixation for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, sometimes rebranding my whole personality around it, then just...move on. I'm not sure when I first noticed this pattern—if it was always there or if it emerged and intensified over time—but it's been part of me for a long while.
And every time I do, I feel such guilt and shame. Who even am I if I can't be consistent, dedicated, substantive? How disingenuous is it that nothing I care about lasts? I’ve always just accepted those feelings; I’ve never poked at them in earnest.
Per my usual pattern, this phase has come with excitedly posting about it on social media and telling all my friends about it, whether they care or not, and engaging it all the time and thinking about it when I can’t and so on; there’s such energy emanating from the idea of blogging again, and it’s tough to resist lofty compulsions and be objective about what’s going on.
The pattern isn’t (just) strong and irresistible because it’s habituated, but because it’s imbued with such energy and excitement.
But what if it, too, fades? I fear the fade has already begun; this post ought to have gone up last weekend, but I just couldn’t get into finishing it. But what if, after paying for a new site, after identifying myself with it on all channels, after spending time posting and posting, after winding up so much time and effort into and around it, what if after all that, I just... move on?
I’m not entirely sure what sparks these phases, where all that energy comes from; I suspect it’s a mix of my ADHD and bipolar, but there could be other things in there too. I’m also not sure what ends it; is it some finite sum of energy that runs out, does some other mood or phase seize me, is it just a matter of time, or what?
Regardless, I always feel that shame and guilt I mentioned above. Part of that is based on how my mental health plays into these phases; I have a lot of frustration regarding my mental health, so any role it has in this is not entirely welcome, so to speak.
But there’s also that sense of being disingenuous if my identity, what it’s based on and what I care about, fluctuates so easily. These evanescent phases seem so self-invalidating when they pass and I end up feeling so fake in hindsight.
Other phases have included gardening (houseplants in a later phase), coil guns and rail guns (hours of youtube and wikipedia researching their construction and physics), building and managing a home server, researching Walt Whitman’s personal letters, and many, many others. And all of them have come, and all of them have gone.
Last month, I skeeted on Bluesky about my phases and fixations. Namely, I was concerned this blogging really was just a symptom of bipolar, and I was worried it was fleeting despite my enjoyment.
But that’s tough: I’ve spent a lot of time feeling disingenuous about myself in this context, and shaming myself for it, so any sense of identifying with these passing fixations phases as parts of me and who I am and have been is kinda wild.
But it does remind me: I don’t have to feel this way when they pass; I don’t have to feel shame. I can enjoy them while they last and appreciate their place in my life, in my history.
The tricky bit there is how I fear losing momentum: I worry that I’ll end up falling out of something I might have sustained by not putting enough into it. Arguably, it wasn’t meant to be in that case, but even acknowledging that is tough: Given the keen urge to do the thing and the intense interest I feel for it, prospectively admitting it “isn’t meant to be” is hard to accept, nevermind the difficulty in putting any part of it on hold while I wait things out a bit.
But I do think both suggestions have merit for lessening the “hate” I feel about phasing in and out of fixations. I think accepting phases as valid parts of myself rather than divesting their reality, however ephemeral, as soon as they pass is probably healthier; it certainly hurts less than self-recrimination. And slowing things down might keep me from overinvesting—another profound source of the shame and guilt I feel in hindsight.
So, is identity solely the things one commits to and carries with them over the long haul, or can smaller, passing passions be part of who one is and becomes and has been, too? And what measures can one who phases as I do take to balance the investment in and the enjoyment of those phases?
Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay
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Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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