Boxing Day Haul: Pay Attention, Not Money
By: Lucy The Eggcademic, She Her
Tags: Mindfulness, Self, Reflection Questions, Growth, Reflection

My initial intention was to write this reflection in the form of a poem, to realize that I’d been reflecting on this concept quite often. In writing regularly (almost daily!) for Medium, I’ve found myself a consistent space to reflect on growth in a way that I hadn’t really done before.

It’s so exciting that even in planning this poem out, I realized I’d said it all, in many forms. When I look across the themes presented in my poems since my first poem posted on June 3rd, I see my personality and growth shining through without even truly intending or planning for these themes to emerge.

Mindfulness & Presence

For the longest time, I dismissed mindfulness. Though I was absolutely sold that it worked for some people, I tried it again and again and it didn’t work for me. There was shame involved in “not trying hard enough” to achieve this concept of mindfulness that everyone else seemed to benefit from, and over time I evolved this sort of guilt from not getting it “right”.

It took a lot of experimentation, but this year it finally settled into a form that worked for me. My biggest hurdle was not being able to sit still — now knowing how many others struggle with attention, I’m sure I’m not alone.

For me, mindfulness was always presented as meditation, which didn’t sit well with my fidgety brain and body. What isn’t often discussed is how mindfulness can be directed towards your external stimuli too, quite similar to the concept of grounding.

To me, the two are intricately related, and work well because instead of directing my attention inward to bodily sensations (that amplify into panic attacks) or thoughts (that snowball into ruminations), I’m reconnected with my senses.

The most exciting and magical thing is that when connected with my senses, I’m connected with my present, rather than some abstract concept of my future worries. There is only one present, and for me, there’s such a sense of comfort in that.

I learned to connect with my senses (i.e., grounding) as a way to connect with this concept of mindfulness in the most creative and fun ways, from making popcorn…

… to transforming one of my all-time least favourite chores into something that actually helps me relax. This attention shift between begrudgingly having to touch my dirty dishes to having a dedicated 10–15 minutes per day to just exist and be with myself in quiet sloshing warm water silence was such a mental shift.

In a way, the mindfulness ultimately helped me get to the root of some things that didn’t make sense to me. I knew that stress impacts the immune system and health in general, and I knew that was happening because of the physical symptoms I had.

But I never realized that a lot of the symptoms I felt in the moment were directly related to the anxiety I felt in the moment. I didn’t realize that some of my unhelpful coping mechanisms (e.g., binge eating) were me trying to soothe these feelings of queasiness in my stomach, which inevitably made everything worse.

I had such a disconnect between my thoughts, my feelings and my body, and in mindfulness, I started noticing these patterns. Patterns that I realized most people knew or automatically connect, but for some reason wasn’t for me.

Routine & Habits

Setting a routine also really helped me this year, even as everything fell apart during the pandemic. As a graduate student, things really fell apart and stress levels were at an all-time high.

My research involves recruiting human participants for cognitive tasks via computers and I’d planned my entire dissertation around this. When physical distancing measures started, I had to change my entire design to fit the uncertainty of ever collecting in-person data again, change a considerable amount of my proposal.

I learned an entirely new programming language just to be able to put these tasks online. To date, it’s still one of my least favourite programming languages.

What got me through all of this was having a solid schedule. Instead of thinking about how overwhelming it was to redo an entire design process in 2 months and then learn another programming language AND have a functioning set of programs ready by the end of the year (which you should know that I did NOT edit this run-on sentence because that tension you feel while reading this vvv long sentence is exactly how I feel about this all and the lack of punctuation depicts how I have NOT breathed regularly since beginning this sentence)…

(*breathe)

The thing that got me through this year was this solid schedule. Instead of tackling these huge things, I was tackling one Pomodoro at a time (26 minutes work, 6-minute break). I cut down this project into the tiniest pieces, brain dumped all my worries and then got to work on it, one step at a time.

I meal-prepped so that for standard meals like breakfast and lunch where I’m taking a brief break from working, I didn’t have to encounter decisional fatigue over what to eat, nor did I have to do as much clean up from cooking.

When my programming failed, I took a break. Medium writing was one of my newest hobbies that emerged because of the pandemic, and I learned a lot, just from dumping all of my thoughts and creations here.

In the most low-stakes possible challenge, I tried the same poetry prompt five times. I noted my growth. I noted my resilience.

In parallel, this encouraged me on the programming front. The instant gratification of trying out a poetry prompt and seeing it mostly work balanced out the long-delayed gratification of coding a program. I interrupted that mounting frustration with something that boosted my confidence, my creativity.

The most shocking thing is that in programming and in poetry, there are some core things that help with your growth.

You need creativity to tackle the issue given a certain coding structure. Trying a structured poetry prompt helped me notice that in rigid, structured conditions, my brain knew to branch out into new, weird ways to tackle problems. Sometimes, that helped. Sometimes it didn’t but pointed me closer towards the end goal.

The structure is also everything. In poetry writing, I found that when lost, I started with a list. It helps give a road map to how words might flow. With coding, it’s the same. I might not know the exact code I need for each section, I created the same “subheadings” that you might for the beginning of Medium article. This segmented the code into things like,

# display the demographics questionnaire

# load and display images

# export the data to .csv

Advocacy & Boundaries

The final non-tangible thing I’m taking from 2020 is a renewed sense and understanding between advocacy and boundaries. Learning about setting boundaries and understanding responsibility within relationships is something I didn’t really fully understand until … last year.

It makes sense — I have literally been in school since I was three, non-stop. In school, you learn to create work to a rubric and behave to a code of conduct. I was rewarded and became that goody two shoes kiddo. Following rules and others’ expectations got me places.

It also meant that to survive, it took me a long time to develop my own set of values. In fact, arguably I’m still doing that — I’m only beginning to do this. I probably didn’t truly realize that we should be deriving our values instead of absorbing the ones from those around us. Not until I was in my mid-twenties.

It’s wild, I know.

But the more I ask questions, the more I think about things, the more freeing it is.

The more I realized how we so often default, like my past self, to structures, systems, beliefs that are just … there, even if they were there for sinister reasons. We become familiar with things that no longer work:

We automatically place the burden of moving for change on certain groups of people, sometimes abstaining ourselves from doing the distress tolerance of change itself. Change is hard, and if we’re not all in it, if we place the burden on a certain group of people, they burn out.

We burn out.

I have burned out until I learned how to manage it. But should we rely solely on this serendipitous chance? I think we can do better.

I learned that I spent a lot of time fitting in. I learned that I am incredibly good at fitting in, but it took an emotional and physical toll. I am literally so exhausted from dealing with a lot of this discrimination that I was consistently sleeping 9 to 10 hours.

Soon as physical distancing began and I had more control over when, where and how people were messaging me, or talking to me; when choosing to disengage was as simple as closing an email rather than having to pack up and leave, my sleep cycle returned to something closer to your average adult.

I so automatically but actively expended effort to do all of this emotional labour that I chalked up the sleep and fatigue thing to a personality trait. I’m not like this when engaging with groups where I belong, rather than fit in.

I continue to reflect on that.