I can relate to a lot of what you write. Especially the :
In my experience it has been that some part of me truly believed in those problems/ideals/dreams and persisting in feeling them. But also it’s because I am trying to ‘fix’ it while also experiencing those feelings. As an example, I would very often go into states of ‘limerence’ (a hellish state of being). During all of that time I thought that I could not apply the actualism method because of how acutely I felt the suffering, so I would have no choice but to apply real world methods. I went to counselors and therapists and it did help but only in a ‘keeping my head above water’ kind of way. In the most intense periods of that state there would be the deep desire to end it and there was the desire to do whatever it takes, but I wasn’t sure how. Simply put, it can’t be done from there because ‘I am my feelings and my feelings are me’. It was only when I acknowledged that I had a subsequent realization that all I had to do was enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive. Right in there is the desire to be happy and harmless. I really did want to be happy and harmless. There’s no other path for me. When I realized that, I was able to enjoy life more consistently and felt more like I had autonomy. Something nothing in the real world has been able to offer. Everything in the real world is about ‘keeping my head above water’.
All of that to say, it’s actually pretty simple. Just as Vineeto has suggested:
[Richard]: ‘To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life … the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own … or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared.
You do not need to wait “clearing the cobwebs out of some ‘dark corners’ of myself”. Such an activity (in my experience anyway) becomes an exercise in keeping ‘my’ problems alive. You know what it is to feel good. You know what it is like to experience pure intent. Maybe go back through your journal and read through the experience and rememorate it again. Any problems are easily solved when you are feeling good.