I Activated My Free Will?

For months, I had not been myself. For months, I desperately picked my own brain, tried desperately to analyse my behaviour and figure out the cause of my sudden, seemingly out-of-nowhere change in habits. Almost everything seemed impossible to do anymore; waking up early, doing assignments on time, following through on plans, completing my to-do list, etc. My entire routine had fallen apart. And it's not necessarily uncommon for my routine to fall apart every once in a while, when I crave to sleep in or skip the gym or finish a Youtube video before doing an assignment. But never in my 20 years of living had this pit I had fallen into, this lack of routine, this constant breaking of promises to myself, last so long. I was on a constant loop. I couldn't break out of it. I couldn't get up. And, probably worst of all, I couldn't figure out why.

Now usually, I am constantly picking at my brain. Self-analysing. Trying to figure out why I feel a certain way. Why I'm doing certain things. I am always working at it incessantly and can't seem to let it go until I get to an answer. It's quite obsessive, actually, in a way that worries me, but I'll deal with that later. Anyway, you can imagine how my brain reacted to these months of my perceived failure that just sprung on me out of nowhere...or rather, I should say, that I fell in to. I tried coming up with so many answers: "I just started commuting, so I'm a lot more tired from the journey. It takes me about an hour to get to campus now" - on days where I didn't have to go to campus, nothing changed. "I have more difficult classes this semester" - the difficulty of which I never faced because I never studied. Each time I created an excuse, an explanation, it was debunked. I could not figure it out, and it ate at me - at my sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-assurance. I became even more unmotivated, felt so low on some days that I didn't go to class at all. I had fallen into a hole that I couldn't climb out of, and the bad habits continued to spiral.

I also used Chatgpt incessantly, (nothing I am proud of), and constantly vented to the AI chatbot turned therapist that would in return provide me with a long paragraph of potential explanations, suggestions, and affirmations. But even that was subject to a cycle, and not a very productive one - fail, vent, read affirmations, get motivated, fall back into what had, by then, become a full on habit. So I found another consolation: Chatgpt had told me once that I needed a reset, and I clung to that; I had been dreaming of starting over again, when all the remnants of the current semester were in the past, but I was afraid to validate that feeling because it felt more like a desire for escapism than a valid rationalization. But when I was given the suggestion, it clicked. Of course, it made total sense. My brain is just craving a reset because it has become accustomed to the cycle of habits associated with this semester.

And so I set my sights on the summer break, and tried to finish strong (and failed at that too; it wasn't terrible, thanks to easy classes, but it just kind of...lulled to a stop). The first week of summer, I changed my actions. I dragged myself out of bed, went for walks outside, with minimal phone usage, and took in the sun and trees. I walked outside everyday, bought a new novel to get back into reading, switched off my phone often. It felt optimistic, a breath of fresh air, a change. It was also temporary, as the root of my bad-habits remained: I still needed to fix my sleep schedule, to not go to bed late only to have my mornings - the time of the day I have always found best to thrive in productivity - eaten away at, until I started to get fatigued, the intended productivity of my days being thrown off by the hours of wasted time I spent trying to adjust to my surroundings, walking 40 minutes to the nearest library. I spent the subsequent two weeks after that in a different state, visiting family, where I let myself fall back into inaction, piling up excuses of a lack of personal space and autonomy to have a proper routine. And so my weeks of summer - the weeks I had meant to spend making up for six months of not being myself - were passing me by, unchanging.

It was only about a week after I arrived back home, ready to disregard the past month and stat again, but ultimately changing nothing about my actions, that I seemed to finally snap. An onslaught of tears, exhausted with myself, followed by anger, an irritated determination, like I was facing an enemy who wanted to bring me down, and I spearheaded this anger towards that imaginary enemy, and just...got up. It was weird, but it suddenly dawned on me, with such a hilarious obviousness, that I had free will. I could do whatever I wanted. I could bring myself out of this hole. It didn't have to be something that happened to me. I was in control of my own actions, of whether or not I continued to lay there, bedrotting like some incapable being, or whether I was going to get up and be the person I wanted to be, the person I know I am, and the person I was going to continue being - by fire, by force. And I just did. And then the next morning, I got up early, earlier than I had in months, and I went to the gym, and exercised, and I studied for hours, and I cleaned, and I read, and I made my bed. I have free will. Whatever I was trying to figure out was stopping me all those months, it was irrelevant. Nothing was truly stopping me. Any obstacle I faced was all in my head, and while I always knew it was, I finally realized I didn't have to sit there and take it, waiting for some therapist to coax it from it's spot on my path to achievement. So I fucking kicked it outta there. I'm still not entirely sure what happened all those months. But I have free will. If any of this resonated with you even a little bit, know that it really is all in your head. If you really want to change that bad, you literally can just wake up and decide to. You don't need some external factor to push you, to let you. You have free will.

Alhamdullilah