I've always been unable to stay still. Although not hyperactive, I might seem so, as my mind is constantly looking for something to do. This boredom appears to be quite different from that of other people though. Generally when people feel bored they solve it by finding a way to idle away the time. Watching TV, browsing facebook, etc. I can do those things if I want to, but generally that's just not enough. I need stimulation and those things are not fundamentally anything that requires my attention. Whether I watch a show or not, the results will be the same and I can get the gist of things without expending my full attention. Thus the rest of my mind still wanders, causing distress unless I can guide it.
This instinct to always keep going is one of the my strongest motivators. I know there is always something more, so I feel like whenever I stay still I'm falling back. That simply taking a break is detrimental, unless that break is necessary to keep going later on. Idle time by itself is worthless to me.
I don't always have this level of motivation though. Despite my best efforts, there are still times when I do nothing of value. As much as I dislike those times, I still act like that occasionally. Mostly it's due to sleep deprivation or other kinds of fatigue.
Recently I've found a very fulfilling activity - writing. While I've written blogs and schoolwork for years, it was always inconsistent and based on external factors. Although I've liked to write, it took a special kind of motivation to do. I needed to be inspired or have an external goal, both of which are not reliable.
At one point this inability to control my creativity started to bother me. I knew that I'm skilled enough to always write the way I did at my best times. That with even a little effort, I could up my standards.
What remained was finding motivation to do so. As I was in pretty bad depression at the time, all my motivations were about doing things that are less horrible. During depression it was extremely harmful for me to simply idle away, as that always caused a storm of uncontrollable thoughts. Thus, I exercised, programmed and did many other things that were not particularly enjoyable, mostly because they were less awful than doing nothing. I didn't realize it at the time, but my motivation for programming was not inherent.
As I recovered from depression, it puzzled me how I have become so useless. That I can't consistently do even the things I did while depressed, despite being mentally stronger now.
I thought about this often and eventually found ways to control my attention ore. To create inspiration where there once was none. To return to writing stories that I thought I would never complete.
Right now I have a story that is 29 pages long. It's the longest piece of structured writing I've ever written and what made it happen was mostly my stubbornness. That I returned to the story that I was unmotivated to keep writing. I thought about the story frequently until I realized what needs to happen next. This process has happened several times, thus reaching the current pagecount.
What's especially thrilling is that the increase in quantity did not decrease quality. In fact, I have learned to write conversations and descriptions better now, with less stuttering and clumsy sentences.
Then again, despite the progress, I haven't yet regained all that I've lost. The way I write now is less emotional and more intellectual. Despite the substance of the story not changing, I haven't found ways to express it the ways I sometimes rarely did in the past. While my quality in the past was very random, the peaks were also higher.
I can only keep going and hope I'll get better. Because I will.
