Searching for Joy in Simplicity

Balancing Structure and Spontaneity: Reflecting on the Journey to Find Joy and Fulfillment in Routine

I’m still struggling with that flat feeling I spoke about last week .

I love routine. Most neurodiverse people and people who struggle with addiction are the same. But is it possible to overdo routine?

As a family, we’ve been through a little bit of change lately. Seven weeks ago, we returned from a much-needed family holiday to Thailand. My partner returned to work a week after taking 12 months of maternity leave. Two weeks later, our au pair came to stay with us (it’s cheaper than childcare; look it up).

Things are going great on all fronts. My partner enjoys being back at work, especially since she works exclusively from home. The au pair is brilliant. She has far exceeded both of our expectations, and she has a fantastic relationship with our son.

We’re all starting to settle into post-maternity leave life, and we couldn’t have asked for the transition to be more seamless.

But as each day ticks by and the weeks start to roll from into the next, things are beginning to feel all too repetitive, and I’m starting to feel a little emotionally unsettled.

Thoughts like “Man, there’s gotta be more to this", and “Surely we don’t just do this shit for the next 17 years”.

For reference, the au pair works from 9 a.m. (when my partner starts work) until 3 p.m. This was something we agreed on before she arrived. Any more than six straight hours with a spoilt 13-month-old would be tough on anyone. It also allows her the time and energy to experience our beautiful town and get extra employment.

I’m fortunate enough to manage my hours within reason. But to get through my morning routine of stretching and breathwork, doing my work hours, and 30-60 minutes of exercise, then be home and showered by 3 p.m., I’ve got to be up pretty early. I hate being pressed for time, so I like waking up even earlier again to allow some wiggle room.

Usually, I wake up around 4 a.m. Essentially, I have an 11-hour window away from the time I wake up to get all these things done, and despite my best efforts, it can sometimes cause me stress.

I’ve been repeating this day for five weeks now. While this solid routine has allowed for great consistency and, in turn, great results in work, exercise and diet, I can’t help but feel that things are a little bit boring. At times, I feel like I have nothing to look forward to. This is, of course, utter bullshit, but it’s a feeling that pops its head in now and then, but recently it’s been visiting more often than I’d like. I feel like I’m lacking a bit of passion or zest.

As I touched on last week, I’m finding it challenging to find the joy in the simple things without those artificial, temporary highs of drugs, alcohol, over-exercising and binge eating.

My brain is accustomed to either shoving shit into my body or making my body do hard things for me to achieve significant dopamine uptake.

This is, of course, what I am trying to work through because none of the above are healthy, sustainable or time-efficient. Put simply, I need to grind through this shit and trust that in time, I will start to find more joy from the simple things in life, but it’s fucking hard.

I guess I’m apprehensive because this feeling is all too familiar. I have had periods in my life where I have been doing all the right things. I cut back on my substance use, trained hard for a running event, lost weight and seemed to have “got my shit together”, but until I got sober, I could not hold said shit together for over a few months. It would be a stretch to say I had my shit together in early sobriety.

I’m a reasonably apathetic person by nature. In early adulthood, all I ever wanted was to buy a house. I wanted it so badly that it played a significant role in ending my last serious relationship due to a lack of alignment regarding our goals. When I and my current partner bought our first house, the only feeling I got from it was a negative one. I felt underwhelmed because, naively, I expected to feel some great sense of happiness, and the feeling fell far short of reaching my expectations. I felt the same way when I ran my first marathon, 50k and 60k.

So, what have I learned? Doing anything to the extreme, like substances, eating, and exercise, will not provide me with long-term, sustainable contentment. Neither will material things like houses or all the bullshit I have in them.

Even after writing these blogs for over 17 months, I still struggle with feeling like I don’t have the right to complain. After a tough 12 months, we are once again financially secure, we have a roof over our head, and no arsehole can tell us every 12 months that it’s time to move out. We have a beautiful, healthy 13-month-old son, and we live in fucking paradise. I would understand if people were to think that my biggest problem is that I don’t have big enough problems.

But we know these things don’t make you immune from mental struggle. Statistics suggest that rates of depression and mental health problems are much higher in developed countries than in less developed countries. The more shit we have, the more shit we have to stress about.

I finally listened to Brene Brown’s famous TED Talk on vulnerability last night (see below).

The part of the video that resonated most with me was when she spoke about how we can’t selectively numb our feelings. If we numb fear, sadness and stress, we will also numb happiness, joy and contentment. I think this is my biggest issue. I’m still struggling to be vulnerable. Don’t get me wrong; I’m working real fuckin’ hard on it and incrementally getting better at it, but it’s fuckin’ harder sometimes.

Recently, I watched Dan Beuttner ’s Netflix special Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones . In it, Dan travels to places with the highest percentage of centenarians on earth to see what they do differently to achieve such incredible longevity.

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As I was watching, I noticed that I was doing most of the things these communities or tribes do, but I was mainly missing one key component of each of the blue zones. Community.

Don’t get me wrong, I have many fantastic family and friends. But anyone who has moved towns as an adult knows how fucking hard it can be to make friends without school forcing us into rooms where we’re forced to interact with 30 other people.

We chose to move away from our families and communities 14 months ago to give our son a better upbringing and live a slower, more family-centric lifestyle here on the coast, and I don’t regret that for a second.

Although I’ve been working hard on it and made a lot of progress, I still struggle socially. I still fear what others think of me and don’t see myself in the light I should. It makes it hard to put myself out there and find new communities. I’ve never been one to seek out connection actively. Instead, I much prefer to allow connection to develop organically.

Being busy also gives me the perfect excuse not to expose myself to the community. I started to believe my own narrative because it suited me.

So what do I do?

When finding joy daily, I need to have faith that I am doing the right things. My psychologist tells me it will come, and I believe her. It’s just hard. As I’m losing weight and gaining fitness, I want to run or ride further or for extended periods. I know from past experience that when I am feeling a bit flat, how I have been lately, I am most susceptible to drinking, using drugs or binge eating. It’s like I need something a little bit more.

Maybe that little bit more can come from working harder on being vulnerable. Being more open with those around me about how I am truly feeling. I’m pretty bad at it. Sometimes, my partner will read this blog and say, “I didn’t know you were feeling like that. Why didn’t you tell me?” and honestly, half the time, I don’t know the answer. Maybe something in me still doesn’t want to bother people with my problems, especially those I care about most.

As for the community thing, well, I don’t know. I’m still feeling a little overwhelmed by all of this at the moment. But maybe I need to say yes to more things and incrementally expose myself to more situations than I have been.

One thing I will be doing is keeping a diary of how I spend my time. In a week or two, I will review where I am wasting time and how to spend it better. After all, time is the most valuable commodity on earth. It’s finite for all of us, and we have no fucking clue how much of it we have left.

I know things won’t be like this forever. I know I’m doing the right things, and as long as I keep doing them, things will take a turn.

Maybe I just needed to get some of this shit off my chest, and it’ll help me enjoy the long weekend.

So, thanks for putting up with me, and I hope you all have a ripper of a long weekend.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

What do you do to get yourself out of a funk? How do you reset? I’d love to create a discussion in the comments about how people navigate these experiences and share ideas others can implement.

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