This week finds me in the doooom part of my cycle where life feels HARD and the dream is just to feel alright please. My mood/energy fluctuates a fair bit still, and so I try to just meet it and not fight it or guilt myself. And then, lo and behold, I feel okay again. Miraculous.
Part of any dream requires baseline okayness, so don’t forget to build it in!
Sometimes it’s time to push and inspire and motivate and sometimes it’s time to just give yourself a flippin’ break. This week, I am temporarily releasing my commitments to all but the most essential things. Toddler, animals, body: I’m looking at you.
If you need to do the same, I salute you! (Hustle culture begone.)
Sooooo, what can you do to prioritise being okay this week? Is there anything you need to let go of, just for the moment? Or are you full-throttle chasing down your dream? Or somewhere in between?
Let me know!
And if you want to join the One True YES/NO challenge, which ties in with the Working on a dream series, then start here. YES/NO is the daily/weekly practice of moving closer to a life that works for you.
Working on a dream is the longer game. What makes you thrill with aliveness? How can you move towards it or bring it more to the centre of your life? You know what I’m talking about, that thing you do that makes you bubble up with THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM!
You don’t have to follow both, but if you are working on unmasking/recovering from something/driving for more autonomy then come along.
Podcast transcript
Good morning!
It's me and Zeus again here to talk about your dream and my dream.
So I think about my dream to help you think about yours.
This week I am mainly reining in my expectations on myself.
I think when I started the voice notes thing, I was in the part of my hormonal cycle where I'm full of energy and extremely inspired.
And this week finds me in the opposite point of my cycle where I feel like I'm just about holding it together and need to give myself a break in any necessary direction so that I don't crumble under the pressure of my own expectation.
So, that looks like:
Not beating myself up about the fact that I've got lots of different projects on the go.
I'm just streamlining where I put my focus.
So the priority has to be my non-fiction book. And so my novel...
It has a pin in it and the work that I'm doing there is just trying to keep the faith that I am going to be able to wrangle it into an actual novel.
It's been a while since I completed a novel and I really understand now why that is because of the way my brain works.
So I have so many different ideas as I attempt to complete a novel.
And I keep kind of coming up with a better ending and a better ending or,
you know, rethinking a big story twist that could happen towards the end.
And I end up with so many different ideas and possibilities that I get really
overwhelmed and confused.
And that's the point I'm at with this novel. I have a first draft, kind of.
but I can't commit to what I want to actually happen at the end.
So I'm putting a pin in it and I'm just focusing on my nonfiction.
And I'm also going to change my schedule for the newsletter because I've completely swamped myself.
And ironically, by setting up this new series of working on a dream, I pushed my dream even further away from myself but it's okay because I've caught myself! And I'm going to change things because I can do that because I'm in
control of my own life… so is there anything that you need to give yourself permission to set aside? Because the ultimate dream of course is feeling okay and for me one of the ways I know I'm okay is the quality of my thoughts - how much I'm able to think. Whether I'm beating myself up, whether I'm having kind of vague suicidality which I know is a really common part of the neurodivergent experience.
And I know that it comes up for me when I'm overwhelmed, when I feel like I can't manage in the world. And actually I know whenever I have any thoughts like that, which I do very rarely now, I know that it just means I need to give myself a break.
I need to see where I can pull back.
So this week, if you need it, here is permission for you to give yourself a break.
And even if that means putting aside your creative dream for a little while or
whatever the thing is that you are working on and if, unlike me, you are raring to go, then that's amazing!
Keep going! And tell me how you’re making space for your dream in your life. Okay I got to go continue the walk so I get home in time to start the day. I’m sending lots of love to you all. Bye bye!
Come on Zeus!
📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction + her first domestic noir. 📚
Share this post