Emma!
initiative/motivation is at approximately "set a timer to check an idle game in 50min & close eyes until then"
@emerald have you considered spending the 50 minutes examining what's getting in the way of your initiative, while you're doing that?
@madewokherd sort of, I've been thinking about it (esp. in relation to potentially making a hypno thing) and I'm mostly coming up… empty. not "blocked" initiative, just a total lack of it. no motivation, can't even really imagine a better state that I could reach by doing something (tried thinking about how nice it'd feel to have done/accomplished X and realized I didn't feel any better in that hypothetical + possibly worse off w/ disappointment if it didn't go exceptionally well)
@emerald FWIW when I say "examining" I mean directly observing (and maybe even poking a bit), not analyzing.
What you're describing sounds like learned helplessness, not that I'd know much about that.
mh stuff
@madewokherd oh right, it's been a hot minute since I last thought of "learned helplessness" (which is odd b/c there was a period where that was a primary way of understanding myself). might be a useful frame to adopt again b/c the name suggests a solution (learn/teach myself something different) in a way "idk, motivation well dry" doesn't
I think I do know what you mean by examine — something like being open to / poking for the embodied feeling of [something], such as by posing yourself questions & seeing how honest different answers feel? (that's the only technique I can verbalize better than "pay attention to small currents") I've done a bit of that, nothing formal recently, but trying be aware of what's going on when I choose to do one thing instead of another
mh stuff
@emerald It seemed to me that which solution it suggests depends on whether it's currently an unreasonable response, or a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. I don't know your situation that well.
Like I have to imagine there are circumstances where one's effort is truly ineffective, and the solution is to redirect that effort to escaping those circumstances.
