Yet Another Beginning of the Stress Tracker
And here I go again.
With another start on trying to make a daily, or at least regular blog entry … call it a journal entry … of my perceptions of how stressed I and my acquaintances and my loved ones are, while along the way writing about other things, or places, that are on my mind.
But particularly about making a diary of sorts about political stress, this is like ‘take 10’ or so. I'll call it 9. And since this is the first shot in this resumption #9, I'll dub it 9.1.
I mean, I’ve been making occasional stabs at doing this for literally years. Starting no later than halfway through the Biden term. I initially had in mind making an annotated Excel sheet that could be easily graphed on a 0-10 scale, with my own stress levels casually assessed, with no real criteria to back it up other than my mood at the time. But I didn’t follow through with that. And then another few times … I started again with narratives, a few of which resulted in single posts on this site. In those cases I’d proclaim a new-found commitment to the project, then make one or two posts and wouldn’t get back to it.
Part of my inability to follow through with the idea was simply because when it would have been most helpful and interesting to talk to myself via writing about my political stress, my anxiety levels would be so high into the red zone that I’d feel dysfunctional and I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make myself sit focus my energies to organize my thoughts enough to write. On the other hand, there would follow some short periods during which there’d be good and hopeful news, and I’d feel so unstressed out that I’d forget how important, and frankly therapeutic, it is to talk to myself in an linear way, and the cogency and impulse to record my thoughts would slip away.
To be fair, another, equally large part of my failure to comply with my own prescribed routine of writing simply comes from being too distracted and busy. My fulltime 50 hrs per week job. House chores, including my oversize garden this year, which requires a lot of tending. More than I give it, actually. And particularly in the last month or so, some health issues that were highly distracting. So here lately, a lot of reasons not to take time to engage in therapeutic writing.
Anyway, with some of my personal issues resolved and with political realities having reached another ‘inflection point,’ as it seems popular to say nowadays, this seems like a good day to start writing with a recovered sense of urgency. And in a more general sense I want to try to hold my feet to the fire with a new sense of commitment to writing about the fall of democracy and liberal governance in the United States. Even more than that, I have begun a new research project focusing on Guatemalan emigration to the US. Much more on that in the near future … if I’m true to my self-imposed obligations.
So … I’m back to building a library in what at this point is certainly one of the least-read blog pages on the internet. Which is OK for now. It’s not something for which I have a well-defined goal. Kind of a self-indulgence and a vanity project – as I articulated in one of the first posts I made to introduce myself.
Maybe I’ll get into a rhythm and feel like it’s more important to market my thoughts and words at some point in the near future.
But whatever. Following is resumption stress blog attempt #9.1