Another day on dieta, so naturally, another pull towards writing about how bored I am.
HA.
Are you bored of hearing about my boredom, yet?
But, wait friend! This time… there’s a twist!
And we love a plot twist, right? So NOT boring.
I’ve been calling it boredom every time I try to explain what is happening inside me right now. Except every time I say it, something feels off. I’m not actually bored. Bored is just the word I have. It’s familiar, easy, and everyone seemingly understands what I mean, but it doesn’t match up.
What I’m feeling is more like a strange flatness underneath everything. A kind of… meh. I know that seems like boredom, but fuck, I can’t explain that my body doesn’t align with the damn word because I am not bored. I’m something else.
My newest revelation in the last twenty-four hours (see? not bored, lots of things are stirring) is that I don’t need life to be good, but apparently I need it to be interesting.
This is a mildly alarming thing to discover about yourself while voluntarily participating in a dieta designed to remove approximately every source of stimulation you normally use to entertain yourself.
Cool cool cool.
As the universe does in its beautiful serendipitous fashion, I had a Gene Key reading scheduled yesterday. I wasn’t looking for language to any of this, I was just following another curiosity. I even debated going because I agreed to dieta disciplines where I isolate unless interaction is necessary, but this was scheduled before I made that agreement so I said fuck it and went.
The first word in my chart? …you’re going to piss your pants…
DULLNESS.
I can’t say I love getting hit in the face with a flopping fish, but it is comical.
And that’s it. Dullness is the word I was reaching for and couldn’t find. Boredom is an emotional state. It says, I am restles because there isn’t nough stimulation around me. Dullness is different. Dullness describes the thing itself as lacking interest, sharpness, excitement, color. I am not actually sitting here with nothing to do, desperate for options. I have plenty to do if I want to do something. I can walk, write, meditate, sit outside, talk to my husband, play with my dogs, sing and dance, talk to trees, watch moose in my backyard. I am not lacking options. I am experiencing those options as dull. Boredom says there isn’t enough to do. Dullness says what is here doesn’t feel alive enough.
Oof.
There is it. I am not lacking activity. I am lacking intensity.
I have always known I like extremes (no surprise, that’s also in my Gene Keys and Human Design and Astrology and all the things… sigh).
Not in a dramatic, burn-my-life-down kind of way–although I have resorted to that when I’ve reached a severe low. But typically it’s more like: if I am going to do something, I want to feel the whole fucking thing.
I don’t just want to see the ocean. I want to swim with sharks.
I don’t just want to go rafting. Give me the white water.
I don’t just want to camp. I want to take the truck somewhere remote by myself, disappear into the wilderness, and then while I am sitting there think, you know what would be even better? Piloting a plane by myself. Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail by myself. Something more.
Even when I am already doing something that other people might call extreme, part of me is scanning the horizon for the next edge.
Travel is the same. I do not want to land somewhere beautiful, check into a hotel, and observe a place from behind glass. I want to be inside it. Put me where the locals live. Feed me what they eat. Let me get lost. Let me be uncomfortable. Let me misunderstand something. Let me be temporarily stripped of the routines and references that make my own life feel familiar so I can try, however imperfectly, to stand inside someone else’s world for a minute.
That is what feels alive to me.
I want to gorge on a place. On a meal. On a landscape. On a culture. On an experience.
I want to be so full of it that I have to unbutton my pants in the middle of a Michelin restaurant and laugh because there is absolutely no fucking chance they are buttoning again before I leave. True story.
I want the story. I want the sensation. I want to be altered by having been there.
I have always known this about myself.
What I am only beginning to understand is that the wanting itself is not the problem. The interesting question is what happens when there is no edge to chase. The answer is that I start manufacturing one. If nothing is pulling me toward something, I start looking for something to pull me out of where I am. Anything with enough voltage to cut through the flatness.
From the outside, I bet this behavior can look exactly the same. I can book the same plane ticket, take the same class, start the same project, drive the same dirt road, but the impulse underneath is completely different.
One says: Holy shit, I want to see where this goes.
The other says: Holy shit, get me out of here.
Same action, different source. One is curiosity, the other is escape. Dullness is making that different impossible to ignore. Especially because right now I have intentionally removed most of the things I would normally reach for to change the channel. I cannot easily outrun the meh.
I gifted myself the privilege of sitting in it long enough to notice the itch underneath it. The impulse to make something happen. The subtle panic that maybe nothing is happening. The fear that maybe this is just life now.
Ordinary. Routine. Predictable.
Bobinsana, I thank you for showing me what I truly feared in only a couple days: I am terrified of an ordinary life.
Some part of me equates ordinary with unlived. As if a life only counts when it is memorable. As if aliveness needs witnesses. As if the story has to be good enough to tell later. As if breakfast on my deck with my husband who looks at me as though I’m the most beautiful creature on earth or walks in fresh mountain air with my dogs every day at dusk to view the alpenglow are somehow less real because they repeat.
Having regular moose visitors in my backyard is objectively fucking extraordinary. The mountain views with centuries old pines are extraordinary. My dogs as unique beings are extraordinary. My husband as an ever-changing entity is extraordinary. The fact that I am a soul in a meat suit, hurtling through the universe on a giant rock circling a star that will one day burn itself out, is objectively fucking extraordinary.
And yet somehow I can still wake up and think: Meh.
That is WILD.
Not because I should be walking around in a permanent state of ecstatic gratitude, staring at my hands and weeping because existence is miraculous. That sounds exhausting. But because it shows me how quickly extraordinary becomes ordinary once I get used to it.
The mountains become the view. The dogs become the routine. My husband becomes familiar. The moose becomes another Tuesday.
The miracle doesn’t disappear. My attention does.
That seems to be what dullness is exposing for me. Not that life has become less alive. That I have become less sensitive to the aliveness already here. I keep reaching for contrast to combat it. Bigger. Stranger. Newer. Further. Riskier. More. Anything that creates enough friction to wake my senses back up.
I do not think the answer is to stop wanting those things. I love that part of me. I love the part that wants to see what is over the next ridge. I love the part that says yes to the strange road, the unfamiliar food, the wild idea, the place where I do not know the rules. I do not want to flatten myself into some spiritually sanitized version of contentment where I convince myself I no longer need adventure.
That would be bullshit.
The question is whether adventure can remain a desire without becoming a requirement. Whether I can want intensity without needing intensity to feel alive. Whether I can let life be quiet without immediately assuming it has gone flat.
That feels like the actual practice.
Not reducing my appetite. Refining my sensitivity.
Learning to notice the whisper before I demand the scream.
Learning to feel the current even when it is not a wave.
Learning that aliveness does not disappear just because nothing dramatic is happening.
I think maybe I haven’t tapped that well yet. A kind of aliveness that is not dependent on novelty. A current underneath the current. Something that is still there when I am traveling and when I am home. When I am exhilarated and when I am annoyed. When I am creating and when I am resting. When I am staring at a shark and when I am staring at the same fucking tree I have stared at a hundred times.
Maybe the tree is not dull.
Maybe I am asking it to perform.
Maybe life has been alive the whole time.
Maybe the work I am being shown right now is to stop demanding that it prove it?
