Lately, it’s been hard focusing during meetings. Whether I’m talking to a colleague, attending to multiple spreadsheets, or cooling down from work through an episode of my favorite anime, I absorb LED through my eyes. I think it’s the LED.
To paint this in a more positive light: MAN! There is nothing like the thrill that you get when you can’t focus during a meeting with colleagues in the virtual workplace. Virtual or in-person, when a fly or a mite of dust in the room catches your attention while you are in a meeting with colleagues, you end up unexpectedly with the demands of multi-tasking—keeping engaged in the conversation going on and making sure that the fly doesn’t land in someone’s coffee cup, or making sure that you are prepared to take action in the scenario where the mite of dust transforms into a carnivorous alien. When virtual, colleagues with can’t see what you’re doing with your hands and feet, so you could take multi-tasking even further by clipping your fingernails, going through your tabs, petting your cat with your feet, and/or staring at something in the background of a colleagues’ video screen; all while a colleague talks, you work on listening attentively, you tell yourself “to each their own,” and tell yourself that there are many ways of facilitating active listening. With such difficult demands upon your person, your heart can’t help but race, and your blood starts pumping through your body as if you are Sanger Rainsford, participating in the most dangerous game. “If I’m caught not listening, I’m as good as dead.”
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Above, I may have described something that embodies experience with anxiety. Professional athletes sometimes interpret feelings of anxiousness as excitement. I see myself as no different from a professional athlete, so I am apt to see disability and insecurities as exciting challenges. The advantages are my self-esteem, and my willingness to live with myself as I am.
Seeing things in this way, however, can be exhausting, and I can’t always muster up the willpower to do it. When I see things from the opposite side, a desire to change myself arises. The desire makes me feel so greedy; it is so large, so seemingly infinite in potential, quantity, and dimensions, that I am brought to a mental place where my spirits are high, even if my hopes are low. In such a state, I believe more than anything that I need to change as person. “You can change,” I tell myself. “You just need to want it enough, wish for it enough,” I tell myself.
In the meanwhile, the mother within me—rational, and always apt to preach street smarts—says that I shouldn’t work myself too hard, push myself too hard, or worry too much about changing myself. “You’re premature, and your body is weaker than others,” I remember now; my mother has said this to me so many times while trying to convince me not to do something that is dangerous or physically exerting.
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I’m not sure where I’ll go from here. However, I think this is the development of an understanding that may pull me out of darker trains of thought.
Pasfut Trailblazing 