Motivation.
I need to quit this by Alex Hanoko
Today has been a fortunately difficult day.
Yesterday, after six weeks of recuperation post my spinal surgery, I headed up to San Francisco to Blurb and my coworkers.
I woke up at my normal time (7am) and did my normal morning things only at a barely, well not even barely, normal pace. By 9:30am, I finally left the house and drove up 101.
Besides a lunch meeting, most of my day was spent catching up with folks. At about 3pm, my body leaned over and whispered in my ear, “you have 60 minutes until I shut down and make you cry,” so I left.
This morning, I awoke at my normal time and did my normal morning things. Except this time, the pain between my shoulders snaked up to the back of my head and slammed my face into my desk repeatedly for about an hour. Or maybe it was a couple of minutes. It was all a blur.
As I laid (ok, mom, as I lay) on the couch in a losing battle to will all sound and movement to stop until the muscle relaxers kicked in, I began to think about motivation.
When people discuss motivation, they often talk about it as intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external). That the source of our motivation comes from ourselves, or that we have to rely on others or outside occurances to motivate our activities.
One of the most difficult parts of living with bipolar is that now that I am properly medicated, the mania no longer exists. Imagine going the majority of your life knowing that at some point a massive amount of energy was going to flow through your veins allowing you to complete almost superhuman amounts of high quality work. Imagine the comfort in knowing that time and deadlines didn’t matter, because when the mania kicked in, nothing would stop your ability to deliver.
And then its gone.
I never needed motivation to be successful. Just the kinetic energy of a manic episode. And now, for almost the last ten years, that mania has been castrated, and I have to find ways to overcome and supplant it.
Frankly, I had to re-learn how to motivate myself to work.
What I learned was that motivation wasn’t about the why or the how, but about acceptance.
Until I am no longer able to accept the messiness of the kitchen, I will not clean it. My motivation is now tied to the outcome, and the trick is convincing myself that the current situation is unacceptable.
There are three consequences of this. one is a well developed definition of right (acceptable) and wrong (unacceptable); two, being way more accepting of everything; and three, a complete lack of understanding delayed gratification.
Which leaves me where I started today. Laying on my couch realizing that while I should wash the dishes in the kitchen, I accept their current state, and so will order dinner from Door Dash instead.
Motivation is a lie. Do things because you believe in changing their state. Do things because you want to live in a different world. Do things because it is the right thing to do.
Don’t wait for some mythical mental motor to kick into existence. Just do it.