The effect of winter in my psyche

During the last several months, I have been unemployed. Aside from the immediately obvious, which is, not getting payed, and having to move back to my parents home as a consequence, I set myself on a path of self-discovery. I was able to identify that I wasn’t happy at my previous job, and that I had been in this state for a year. To this realization, I promised myself to learn from my mistakes, and prioritize my mental health to short-term rewards, such as a paycheck at the end of the month.

I also took on previously buried projects, like developing a OS from scratch, and learning more about GNU/Linux, and systems programming. These interests had been so buried inside me because of the daily job, that they actually took a while for me to re-gain the interest and realize they had been there all along.

Having made these two important realizations, I wanted to remain motivated and active in this space, so that I could keep on learning. This is why I developed a routine. During weekdays, I would wake up at 07:00, have something to eat, read for a while, and start working on my interests. In retrospect, I was able to keep up with this routine because I felt part of the natural day’s cycle. At 07:00, while I was waking up, the sun was also starting to rise, so, this felt natural.

Recently, I have been noticing I’m not keeping up my routine as well. Naturally, being November, the sun rises a lot later, therefore, at 07:00 I feel like it’s not yet time to wake up. It’s cold, dark, and honestly, I still feel tired. It just doesn’t feel natural. Not to mention the sun sets a lot earlier, so I find myself wanting to go to sleep a lot sooner that I should. Also, based on the long evenings, I find myself eating, just to kill time. This kind of behavior, in my opinion is letting the environment take priority over myself, which can be translated to, letting yourself flow. I do not want to let myself flow, I want to learn, to feel so overwhelmed by the new knowledge, I can’t even scope the big picture, I want to feel productive, and useful.

There must be a way to embrace my surroundings with this feeling, but right now, I can only think of fighting my surroundings, to take actions that will bring said feeling back.