Sept 28

I am in my office, lounging in my steelcase office chair, leaning back, attempting to fulfill a promise to myself to write, manually, for twenty minutes, just for the sake of writing, because it seems to be necessary for me to write every day with my own voice, or I lose it.
One of the two windows in the room is open, with the blind only down a third of the way from the top and the curtains off to the sides mostly, and the other is closed. This configuration allows a pale sort of gray light into the room, insufficient for doing anything of note, but enough to see the main points, the desk, the three monitor setup with the one on the right vertical, the Yamaha speakers to the right and left side of the displays which run center, the five foot long black office desk underneath it, the RULES OF THE ROOM posted on four separate 8.5 x 11 printed sheets taped to the wall, rules which mostly insist that I work less and take care of myself more.
Today taking care of myself meant doing an hour of physical therapy, cleaning the house, deciding to log into a work meeting and being pleasant instead of completely robotic. My office is tidied up. And I wrote personal goals on my whiteboard again. One of them says: write for 20 minutes. Then there are columns. M T W TH F. I am making goals not just for today, but the rest of the week. I expect to do better. I expect to try harder to work on my hobbies instead of working on taking care of Penny or the house or the dog or even work.
Part of me feels I should be working even now but a louder part of me tells me that this is fine. It’s fine to write.
Here is something I am telling myself nowadays:
You have to work on your hobbies. Hobbies are work. You must allow yourself the time to actually work on them.
If you do not or will not, then work and family will consume you. You will do nothing else. You will lose yourself. Maybe not forever but maybe yes forever.
People without hobbies are often bored and uninteresting. You must have hobbies because hobbies help you engage with yourself and with others. They force you to let new information into your head. They force you to stretch out and not be so controlling and stiff. They will help you make friends and talk to others. They will help you to not feel alone.
It’s worth doing the work to do the hobbies.
And part of doing the hobbies is a change in self talk. This is something I’ve been working on too, just constantly and repeatedly talking to myself about how I will change — how I will finally do something different — I will not just become a workaholic again now that the shoulder surgery is mostly over and the physical therapy is effective and I again have the ability to sit at a desk and type at length. I will not return to a “default” of working. Instead I will try to emulate me in my 20s. In my 20s I would work a little and then try to squeeze in hobby time over lunch or even in the afternoon if I could manage to get away for an hour. I want to strain again, I want to actually put my main life energy into hobbies.
It’s hard - it hurts the way my physical therapy is hard and hurts. I am assigned a motion — exterior rotation on arm. Move from the ninety degree position to a hundred and thirty degrees. The last twenty degrees hurt and feel tight because some muscles have been unused for so long. My brain wants to guard my shoulder and signals tightness. I must repeat this move twenty times, take a break, repeat it, take a break, repeat it. Then do it again later in the day. Then again the next day. Once I have regained that range, the next step is to get it out to a hundred and forty degrees. And so on, until I have full range.
The range I have in my hobbies is severely restricted, which means the range in my life is similarly restricted.
So work on them. You must put in the time.

That’s my new self talk. You must talk the talk before you can change anything, remind yourself constantly of the importance of these things. I cannot seem to motivate myself to write by telling myself that the writing is important. It’s not. Nothing will come of these words externally.
But what is effective is me telling myself that I don’t want to be the sort of person who doesn’t write anymore — and more generally, someone who doesn’t have hobbies.
I am tired of saying, like an old man, oh yeah I USED to play guitar but I don’t anymore.
I am still a guitarist and musician. And I will play again. I will write again. I will have hobbies again.

We are back from Albania. Penny has a baby in her. The clinic deposited it on Saturday, in a small blue room on the first floor. They did not invite me to be present. The United States clinic that did the last transfer said it’d be fine for me to be in the room but this clinic whisked her away and did it without me.

I am trying to be positive even though we’ve had failures. The self-talk is important. Everything starts with the self talk. When the self talk dies down, it is a signal I am getting depressed again and am likely not doing the things I need to do in order to stay afloat at sea.