After our podcast went live on Wednesday, I decided I would go ahead and make my position clearly known. I expected to get attacked on social media for it, because, well, that’s what happens on social media. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who engaged in dialogue with very little personal attacks (they were logical fallacies, not like a “you suck at being a human” kind of attacks). After roughly eight ours of engaging in meaningful conversation, I found I was mentally exhausted.
I came to a nice conclusion around mid-day. I had to stop. I couldn’t keep going at that pace. Eventually I was going to say something incorrectly because I was mentally fatigued. When I accepted that, I just stopped and disengaged. I left questions unanswered and people I didn’t respond to. There was nothing malicious about it. There was nothing cowardly about it. It was a healthy decision. It was a decision based in self-care.
After I disengaged, I did revisit after a while, because I don’t want any of you to feel like I don’t care about your responses. I do. But, I went downstairs and focused on dinner with my family, reading books to my girls, spending time with my wife. The next day at work I gathered my nerd friends and we talked about the most nerdy stuff you could imagine. Those are all things that I enjoy, they energize me. It was like the mental version of eating a great meal after a really hard work out. Historically, this not something I have ever been good at. I usually go and go and go until I’m so unhappy that I can’t enjoy anything.
This is a skill I want to learn well enough to teach my girls. When you engage, go all in, full throttle, all out, burn the boats. Then stop, disengage, recharge, recenter. Re-engage and go after it with everything you got again.
Working for my life’s vision of writing stories in a beverage shop that I own.