Setbacks And Discontentment

Sometime between midnight on Sunday and the time I would normally get up in the morning on Monday, I was lying down in my bed watching, or rather listening to a YouTube video by Marcus Du Sautoy about ‘what we cannot know’ when suddenly I decided to get up and do some writing.

My intention is to kill two birds with one stone in this blog post. The first bird I want to kill (no offence to any vegans who might be reading this) is a bird called the setback.  So here goes.  After beating myself up for not doing any serious writing in 2 months, I eventually got tired of the bruises I got from kicking myself in the butt and decided to do some writing sometime in the middle of January. Having settled on what I wanted to write about, I got off to a flying start.  I quickly wrote my first draft and spent the next few days after fine-tuning my work. After about a week and half of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of words, I was totally satisfied with what I had written and decided to publish my work. 

On the day I decided to publish my blog post, I was in very high spirits; I felt very happy in and with myself.  Publishing my blog was the last thing I planned to do before leaving my house that morning. Excluding the sun, everything was looking up that.  I had another read through of what I had written, feeling confident with myself and in myself, I clicked on the publish button on blogger, but not before I clicked on the save button for what felt like the 100^th time. Normally, when I click on the publish button on blogger, a little rectangular box appears asking me to add tags or something along those lines. On this unfaithful day, when I clicked on the publish button, the rectangular box did not appear. I thought this was rather strange but because I was confident that I had saved my work, I wasn’t particularly worried at all. I decided to close the page and go to my saved drafts and just get on with my life from there.

When I opened the draft that I believed I had saved for at least a thousand times, low and behold, my most recent draft-the one I wanted to publish hadn’t been saved. Instead, I had saved my very first draft. At this point, whatever ray of internal and external satisfaction I had going on in my life at that time vanished with the realisation that I had lost a week and a half worth of hard work of what I   considered to be one of my best works so far.  I was absolutely gutted; my world came crashing down in a heap. In my panic, I tried but failed miserably to recover my work. with every passing moment of disappointment in myself for not taking extra precautions to protect my writings, I could fell the heavy and dark cloud of set back slowly creeping up on me from behind the shadow of my disappointment.

Eventually, I reluctantly accepted my fate and somehow managed to peel my deflated self away from my computer.  I set out of my house with my cloud of setback firmly resting comfortably on my head and shoulders. My day went from hero to zero in less than a min. my high expectations had completely disappeared and was immediately replaced with a feeling of total deflation.  Even as I write this blog I can still feel the emotions I felt that day.  I spoke about the event somewhat semi-seriously to a friend because I needed to share my experience, but I didn’t or couldn’t convey my true emotions.  For some reason, I couldn’t express freely and completely how much that event set me back.  This is probably why I am talking about it via this medium,

What am I saying? Setbacks are a sad or maybe not so sad reality of the world we live in. Accepting a major setback like the one I had can be difficult, even harder still is coming back from a setback.  However, setbacks help us to grow, they help us learn about ourselves and the world around us. Setbacks can sometimes break the monotony of always getting things right (in a good way).

Now that the bird called setback has been somewhat killed, I think it is time to move unto the second bird on my list, discontentment.  So, After I finally accepted my fate, my next step was to see if I could somehow use the draft that I had to come up with something better than what I had written before. Basically, I was trying to look on the bright side of life, as you do. I figured that if I could immediately come up with something better than what I originally wanted to publish then that would make me feel good about myself and reinforce the cliché that behind every cloud is a silver lining….. Sadly, when I tried to do this, I realised that my enthusiasm for writing the article had completely evaporated and condensed somewhere I didn’t have immediate access to.. seeing as this wasn’t a do or die situation, I decided to leave the blog post alone: I didn’t do any more serious writing for more than 2 months after I had my big fat dollop of disappointment.

Now in all that time after my big fat dollop of I can’t believe this crap, I have carried around with me this sinking feeling of discontentment. You see, when I don’t write for a long time I start to feel restless. I start to feel like I am missing a vital part of my identity.  In a nutshell, most of my feeling of disappointment from my set back was eventually replaced with a strong feeling of discontentment. I wasn’t quite over my set back but now I had something more important to worry about:  after all said and done, I still hadn’t published anything on my blog in over 5 months (not a good feeling at all). I consoled myself by telling myself that if I hadn’t had that setback, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.  This was a fair enough excuse for a little while, but after some time this excuse was not enough to pacify my feeling of discontentment. I tried to focus on another great passion of mine, drawing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling off.  Every day that passed by and I didn’t do any proper writing, the feeling grew stronger and stronger.

On the weekend that I started writing this blog post, my feeling of discontentment finally reached a point of no return. I couldn’t ignore it any longer without major consequences to my emotional and mental health. I must say at this point that writing gives me a great sense of satisfaction and fulfilment. it is a great source of release for my pent up emotional baggage and suitcases. Writing is happiness for me. Writing is a great source of vitality and excitement for me. when I don’t write for a long time, I feel a strong sense of emptiness.  As I opened my computer to start this blog post, one of the many voices in my head give me two thumbs up. The more I wrote, the more I could feel my discontentment being replaced by a feeling of wholesomeness. By this very point, I was feeling like a glass of expensive champagne; the sparkly bubbliness had returned to me; the butterflies in my stomach began to flutter in all kinds of amazing ways. Suddenly my big setback didn’t feel as bad as it initially felt. I also decided while writing this blog to finish up that initial blog, as a testament to my determination to never let setbacks hold me down forever. To prove to myself that I have the capacity to learn and thrive from my mistakes. 

if you are interested to read the aforementioned blog, it will be titled: 2018 so far, the review. 

I learnt many things about myself from this experience. On a practical level, as a writer, I learnt that it is very stupid indeed to write directly on blogger because the risk and possibility of losing my work are far too high. Besides, it makes far more sense to create a word document, do all my editing there, save and then transfer to blogger.

 I propose a toast, a toast to doing the things that bring us fulfilment and contentment despite the setbacks life sometimes throws at us.

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writings by Yirakupe Chidi-Muzan