Scaredy Post

I never said I wasn't a coward

Last year I decided to make real effort to salvage my life from the doom of unfulfilled aspirations, and it didn’t work out.

I tried, really hard.

It was very painful and uncomfortable, and took so much effort, and at some point I was really moving forward, and then winter hit and I just fell off the wagon, and ended the year on a slump.

I have a PhD in self flagellation, so all I’ve done this whole time is excoriate myself in my mind, but it doesn’t help. Beating myself up inside doesn’t make my outside any better anymore, and that scares me because I feel paralysed and overwhelmed from how much to do I’ve let pile up, and yet the only way to escape this psychological hell of my own making is to move.

I have to do something, and keep doing it long enough for it to make a difference, or I’ll always be stuck.

And quite frankly, I’d rather just die than be feel stuck for the rest of my life.

Call it serendipity but I saw this tweet and felt seen.

I’ve struggled with severe depression, anxiety, PTSD, and executive dysfunction resulting from that for almost two decades now, and as someone who has always set impossibly high standards for myself, it’s been really hard for me to confront myself and admit that I simply have not done the best for myself that I could have with the time I had, the resources I had, and the access and opportunities I had.

That’s very sobering, and it also makes me really sad.

On one hand, I do feel kind of sorry for myself because it feels unfair that I had to struggle with all this every day, and just could not overcome it, despite how much I threw at it because it knocked me down so much.

On the other hand, I hate myself for not being stronger, not being able to just shake it off, not being the battle princess or the shield maiden I needed myself to be, to show up for myself in ways that other people let me down, and to push through the casual cruelty of society and adult life, to create a bubble of safety and peace for myself through work that feels like I actually did something with my life.

Regardless of how I flipflop between these feelings, the fact remains that I’ve been treading water too long, and it’s because I was scared.

I tried so many things last year, and failed at all of them.

I tried to do art school and failed (to be fair I was really ill), but I learned that to be good at drawing and painting, I just have to force myself to draw, over and over again.

I tried to get fit and failed, but I learned that to actually see noticeable changes, I need to walk three and a half hours every day, broken into fifteen to one hour intervals.

I tried to lose weight and failed, but I learned that to drop weight effectively, I must eat mostly fibre and protein and fast three days a week.

I tried to finish writing my novel and failed, but I learned my characters weren’t compelling enough, and I just wanted to tell the story, but I didn’t have strong characters who would realistically drive the story.

I tried getting rid of 90% of my possessions and failed at that too.

But I learned that if I pack up everything I own into weatherproof plastic tubs and take them away to storage, it has the same mental effect. Out of sight, out of mind, and once I’ve lived without something for long enough, I can know for sure it’s okay to get rid of it.

I tried to start a clothing line, and designed a whole collection of clothes based on traditional Igbo aesthetics (designed designed, meaning I drew all designs by hand from scratch, not cut and paste design), and failed.

I was forced to scrap the entire project because I have a very specific kind of migraine (since I was a child) disorder that makes me get severe migraines and violently ill when I look at certain patterns of lines.

Traditional Igbo aesthetics are very line heavy, and basically, the more designs I produced, the more I began to vomit, have headaches, and migraines in which I would lose my vision. So I had to abandon the project halfway through.

This design is based on traditional Igbo doors.

I still have the designs I made though, I just cannot look at them without feeling ill.

This design is based on traditional Igbo doors

I even tried to build an alternative social network app, because Twitter is honestly so toxic, filled with misinformation and well past its heyday, Clubhouse is a cesspit of meanness and bullying, Facebook wants to be everything and somehow is nothing, and Instagram gives me and many people anxiety.

But I also failed at that too despite having what I still think is a brilliant idea (not that I think my social network is going to compete with any of the above abeg. I just wanted to build a cool, niche place that people would genuinely enjoy coming to, in addition to whatever major apps they use)

Anyway, the primary reason why I failed with this one, was because even though I think the major features of my stealth social app are fucking brilliant, I couldn’t figure out what the main functionality should be.

Should it be a video app? I can’t afford the cloud hosting fees to store video

Should it be an audio app? Same problem, but to a lesser degree.

Should it be a picture app? I can guarantee bad actors will immediately try to post terrible things like child pornography, or far less severe but certainly annoying things like AI slop images, and I simply cannot afford to hire a moderation team for a small app.

So it was going to be a primarily text based app until it could pay for itself, but I still don’t know what the main point should be.

I know HOW I want it to work, HOW I want people to interact on it, but not WHAT they will be spending most of their time doing.

Does that make sense?

I thought about making it a news app or a blogging app, but Substack is already a blogging app. I’m literally writing this on my blog hosted on Substack.

I need to figure out whether people are going to primarily consume content on the app or interact with others and create content.

At this point, I’m very open to suggestions and ideas.

Tell me what your dream social network would be about.

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Anyway, Happy New Year!

I promised to be freer, more light hearted, and actively work hard at my own happiness and fulfilment this year, no matter how scary that might be.

I also want to travel a lot more this year to go see all of my friends who are scattered all over the globe.

I’ve been a hermit for way too long, it’s time to get back out there.

Still am scared by the way.

But fear doesn’t matter in this world.

Action does.

Love,

Lotanna