Somewhere earlier in this blog, I wrote about 12 Weeks being agony and often this makes me think what was happening before.
Life has never been so good.
Hang on, stick with me.
You won’t need a sick bucket for this bit.
It is just not so manic now.
‘Manic’ is a word used out of context; I have a few close friends who are bipolar and manic has a whole different meaning for them.
Where I grew up in Essex people would often say ‘Mate. It’s £ucking MANIC down at Lakeside Shopping Centre today!’
To one of my friends ‘manic’ meant hardly sleeping for a couple of years while they completed a PhD with flying colours in record time.
Then they crashed. Down. Massively, into the other end of manic.
Now I have been up here for a while.
When I got to week six of this 12 Week Year run I went wobbly.I wanted to be strong and stable, but I wobbled.
It all seemed to be working, and I felt shit. It was because everything had started to work and inside a part of me was unprepared for this. The job of that part for YEARS had been to hold back and fuel self-destruction.
In the last few weeks, I have had to perform ‘change management’ on myself and then realised I was on my way through what Kelly and Conner call ‘The Emotional Cycle of Change‘, which is detailed in the 12 Week Year book.
The cycle has five stages:
Stage 1: Uninformed optimism.
Stage 2: Informed pessimism.
Stage 3: Hopeful realism.
Stage 4: Informed optimism.
Stage 5: Completion.
My current area is Stage Four. Which sounds great but I find hard to know what to do, even with all the tools my ‘Bernie belt’ and support of @WorkHubs around me.
Being at the informed optimism stage means I know enough, which means for right now I don’t need to find out anything else.
Let me explain that a little bit more.
For the next couple of weeks, there can be no new moving parts, however attractive.
Then after OuiShare Fest in Paris, the next 12 Weeks begins, and I have already decided to work deeper into what I am doing now.
Between Meet Up’s we run @WorkHubs, apps and gadgets and Fizzle and Authority I don’t need to look anywhere else.
There is joy in repetition and life is urgent
For sixty episodes Phil and I have gleefully pulled together the @WorkHubs podcast, and the title of the post you are reading comes from the episode this week – Not So Manic Now.
It’s inspired by the combination of the song by Dubstar, the last few weeks of terror attacks, election terror and Glenfall Tower.
I also read Brendon Cox’s book about his wife Jo Cox, which has inspired over 100K street parties and get together’s across the UK in the last few days.
Brendon’s story had me walking around with a lump the size of an elephant in the back of my throat as I choked back the tears.
I downloaded it from Audible when I got back from the local street party near @WorkHubs in Euston.
The Dubstar song is both horrific and calming at the same time. I have been listening to it for years to make myself cry and put myself back together.
This week it moved me to a quiet mode of urgent action that I have always craved.
Now I Think I Know What I Am Doing
I can’t explain it here, yet.
It has a lot to do with finding my voice and knowing what to do.
I’d go so far as to say I am not afraid anymore.
