Changes to Be Made

As I mentioned before, I'm now in California with Tene. It's been an exciting two weeks.

We now have an apartment, and on Saturday we finally got everything moved into said apartment. Now I'm just trying to go through boxes and unpack all of the things we own.

I've been having bad dreams lately - they seem to be caused by the combination of stress from the Major Lifestyle Change of moving from Utah to California and the anxiety of the same. I seem to be clenching my teeth as a result, though, which is less than ideal and makes me unhappy. I've been waking up with headaches.

On a different side of things, I've been a little disappointed in my own reaction to the move. I had apparently been thinking - more strongly than just idle daydreams - that simply moving out of Utah would be enough to bump me out of the rut I've been living in for the last .... five? six years? It wasn't. I'm still the same girl I was in Utah, I'm just not wearing winter-clothes anymore. I don't like who I am, and I don't know how to change who that person is into someone I would like.

I have a severe case of akrasia - failure of will - when it comes to motivation. It's hard for me to get the energy to do anything that might be mildly unpleasant (pretty much anything I don't want to do ... and even some things I do want to do). So instead of actually doing anything I just watch stuff on hulu.com and youtube. I just don't care. I feel fine watching things, and when I do feel guilty ... it's not a very strong feeling.

I'm considering doing a complete overhaul of myself, of my personality. First I'm thinking of doing something similar to what Alicorn talked about over at Less Wrong - basically actively rewriting my emotional states, rather than just passively feeling and acting as though my emotional states are something that are out of  my control that I cannot control. Hopefully this will help with my depression as well as with my motivation. I'm also looking into some mindhacks to help me with my motivational issues (the link is another post at Less Wrong, this one about Pain Motivation vs Gain Motivation - I am very much "pain motivated"). I know the person I want to be, and I have some ideas of how to become that person ... I just need to actually enact them.

Another thing I'm considering is possibly taking on a new name - or doing something that is tangible or obvious to say, to show that I'm a different person than I was. That I'm going to become a different person.

I'm not certain if that makes sense, but it's just something I'm thinking about now.