How do you get motivated to front while building a selfhood?

[mackerelgray]

This is something I've been dealing with for a while, so I'm sending it out for peer advice - how do you get motivated to front while building a selfhood, like opinions and interests and things you enjoy for recreation or other reasons to use your body, rather than habitually being a backseat driver?

It's frustrating to be a person, to know you're a person, but just not have a lot of reasons to be yourself in front of other people. I've likened it to depression before, because it feels fairly similar in the "lacking interest in daily activities" field, except you don't really have pre-existing hobbies to feel uninterested in. I've been around in our daily life before, but it's usually for the typical daily grind or talking to friends about something. I do like a good podcast, but again, I usually don't feel up to fronting and sharing my thoughts on them, and the less that I front to have opinions on something, the fewer opinions I'll have, it's a whole vicious cycle of inactivity.

If anyone else has dealt with this, sorry to hear it! Here's hoping we can crowdsource some ideas for Wanting To Exist More!

--Gavin Reed-Machina (he/him)

Comments

[gze]

You've already gotten a lot of really solid advice here! We don't have a lot more to add except that the 'getting started' part (in our experience) is so often the hardest thing. It takes a lot of energy for an engine to turn over and get started, right? But once it's going it's easier to stay in motion, laws of physics etc etc. That's one thing some of us really struggle with, getting started/building the habit and we don't have the best answers on how to deal with that but some things we've tried...

• if the urge strikes, just give ourself(ves) the permission to do it. Stop thinking about it and just do it!
• sometimes reminding ourself(ves) that 'hey, you might not feel motivated to do it now but you'll feel better once you're actually doing it' can help, like with exercise or going outside. Doesn't always work but sometimes it does!
• or all else fails, sometimes someone else in the system doing metaphorical Inner World dragging by the collar, haha

Hope that helps! :3

-Z +etc.

(PS, since you mentioned ping-pong we couldn't help but post a link to PONGS which isn't quite the same thing but it's still fun to play with for a bit!)