Slay the Hydra!

My initial goal with these blog posts was to keep a good backlog of updates so I could have them scheduled for each Saturday moving forward. At the beginning of things it went well, and I was able to have posts flowing smoothly. Then came the move for publication.

Alongside running this website I also run a Facebook page and YouTube channel. Both of which I have tried to do a number of livestreaming events on regularly, more so for Facebook than YouTube at this current juncture. Then came the decision to publish my first novel, Sacred Tears: The Dance of Iris, by December 2023. I knew to a degree that there would be a lot of work involved, but knowledge and action are not the same thing. Being such a newbie in all areas of social media, content creation, and publishing a lot of this process has been trial and error and research. So. Much. Research.

To help myself survive I bought a dry erase board, put it on my wall where I constantly pass by, and keep my “to-do” list. Knowing my “neuro-divergent”-self I recognize the need to not only make lists to help organize my thoughts, but also the importance of lists in plain and consistent sight. If I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist. And if it doesn’t exist then I get into serious trouble. There is just something so satisfying about being able to cross things off the list. Maybe it has to do with the way I grew up in that era of sticker award charts for chores and other tasks.

The thing is that as of late that usual jolt of endurance that can come with marking items of my list has been a much more difficult form of inspiration to obtain. This is largely because nowadays my list has formed into what I call the “Hydra List.” If you know of the hydra from Greek mythology (or watch the Disney movie Hercules) then you are aware of the name. For those of you unfamiliar, the hydra was a mythic beast with multiple heads whose nasty habit was to grow back double the amount of any head that happened to be cut off. At this current juncture in my life I am discovering that each task I “complete” seems to birth a whole new avenue of “to-do” items – all as equally important and urgent as their predecessors.

I kind of stay in this place of constant stress and fighting to try to get my feet back under me. As I look across the room right now I can see my self-motivation message on said dry erase board declaring “Slay the Hydra!” My saving grace in a lot of this has been having the foresight to give myself time buffers. For the launching of my book, I decided back around the end of February that I would get my novel out December 2023. But I didn’t start announcing that on a wider scale until I had already gotten a number of the behind the scenes stuff in motion.

I also waited on finalizing the publication date until I could build up a solid backlog of videos for my YouTube channel, and I do my best to maintain that backlog by giving myself a minimum of a two month buffer between content completion and content posting day. For Facebook I schedule my posts three months at a time. I would do it further out, but Facebook limits you on how much of a pre-schedule you can create.

But I have not been good about prepping my newsletter, tiktok, or (now) blog posts as of late. There has been a definite overwhelm in my mind as I try to process this new world I’m stepping into, and the fight for emotional, mental, and physical health balance is sadly not something I’ve yet conquered that well. And so, I had to shut down the gaming live streams, even though I really didn’t want to. Then I had to allow myself to go without the level of consistency I desired for Facebook lives. Though I’m not ready to completely throw in the towel there. I have a sleep schedule that sporadically swaps between nocturnal and normal human hours, and the newsletter waffles from monthly to once ever two months more than I’d like to admit.

While that sucks and makes me feel like I’ve let the whole world down (yes, my mind can be that over-dramatic about it) I’m at that current stage of just having to recognize that sometimes you don’t get to slay your hydras right away. Sometimes you have to keep on swinging for a good while until you can find your way back out.

By golly do I wish that wasn’t the case and that I could step into that demigod mode that the recovering gifted kid in me wishes they had. Still, I’m not Hercules, and I have to just keep reminding myself that it’s ok to not try to be that hero all the time. As much as I hate admitting it, the world will not end if I don’t complete all the things I want to do at the time I want to do them, and just because things fall apart here and there it does not automatically equate to me being an abject failure.

I don’t know if you can relate to these sorts of struggles, but if you do I would like to suggest that just maybe we both oughtta cut ourselves some slack. ❤