One thing that might be helpful is for you to go to therapy with your wife.
When your brain panics at interacting with other people, your perception of others might be skewed.
Maybe your therapists meant well and your anxiety got in the way of you continuing with them.
Your wife can help provide you with perspective with any therapist you meet.
Just a sanity check after a session can help with judging your own thoughts. Separating what is anxiety and what is your own thoughts.
Please try to find another therapist, one you connect with.
Also, check the laws with each therapist you meet with. They have strict privacy laws around those sessions.
I generally enjoy using paper for this reason as well, but I struggle with organizing the paper. Or, sticking to some form of organization.
I've tried setting up bullet journals, but paper discourages me for a few reasons.
- What if I need to edit or add extra content? I generally write in pen so that what I write down sticks around.
- I prefer to write in a stream of thoughts. To organize the paper, I try to think ahead and categorize my nebulous thoughts. This extra effort discourages me from writing and eventually, from using any organization system with paper.
I like Evernote because I can throw it in there and search will eventually help me find it.
I sincerely appreciate your response and the points you've pointed out.
The process you talk about makes a lot of sense.
The creative process separated from archiving/documentation is a good distinction, thinking about it. I can see how it moves from paper to digital better now.
I'm reflecting on the key point, of being able to let go of old stuff.
That, combined with a limited time in the day (not to mention motivation / discipline / incentive) makes your point a very hard one to swallow.
I think that rationally, it makes sense. Limited time means we can only do so much in a day.
Emotionally, it feels like I should be able to digitize all the ideas and do them "later".
I'm not sure where I'm getting at with this, but I wanted to say thank you for giving me some good advice on how to approach paper and digital for projects.
Hey there, I've enjoyed your comment.
I think we're kindred spirits when it comes to using paper for putting thoughts down without distractions.
Mind if I ask you two questions?
I've been struggling with finding a way to reconcile using paper and the digital realm.
On the one hand, I find sketching out ideas and writing out thoughts a lot more enjoyable on paper. I also seem to distill what I am trying to communicate a lot better too!
And like you've mentioned, there are a lot of negatives to using software to achieve the same end.
- Complexity of interface
- The software runs on a machine that is capable of distracting me way too easy
- Notifications
But how do you deal with having a lot of paper floating around, filled with ideas and sketches of stuff?
I guess, how do you organize them all in a way that isn't just organized clutter?
I've been digitizing all my work with a Document Feeder Scanner, which works alright in the sense that it gets my work onto the machine, but I feel like I'm philosophically missing the point.
Can you comment with some thoughts perhaps? Thank you.
It's very encouraging to hear someone else has trouble sleeping for the same reasons.
Just to add on to what you've said, I find myself holding off sleeping because it means that another work-day is waiting when I wake up.
Meaning, when the time to go to sleep (a good time) rolls around, all I can think of is all the things I haven't done that I should do. And that is stressful, so I end up holding off sleep even more, doing shit to distract myself. Such as Reddit, Quora, or YCombinator.
The things that I feel like I should have done are either personal growth or skill-improvement, or something (like you said) that I wanted to do to meet my own needs.
And it is really frustrating because it makes work a ton harder and it's discouraging, because I know I'm not performing at, or near, 100% like I could be.
I don't know what a good solution is, but it was helpful to read someone else who struggles with the same problem.
Thanks for your story.
+1 for the onenote issue. I spent a lot of time looking for alternatives on linux and didn't find anything close either. It's one of the tipping reasons I use Windows.