Yesterday, I avoided coming up here to sit at the keyboard, to sort through emails, to sip my coffee while scrolling through the early morning cacophony that is Twitter. I’ve been doing this for more time than I like to acknowledge. Instead, I straightened things up around the kitchen and the rest of the house, started some laundry, and pulled a stool up to the kitchen counter to make a plan of sorts. It was a scary concept, but I was armed with a pad of paper, stickies, and a sharp pencil. It was going to happen, or else.
I also silently vowed to get in the car to get groceries before noon — something I resist doing like one might resist jumping into an ice cold pool buck naked just because it was there.
If you looked at my plan, you’d roll your eyes and tell me it was only a list, and I’d probably argue with you knowing you were right, but wouldn’t admit it since I have nothing more important to argue about these days, and I love to argue. For example, a few days ago, the MoH and I got into it over a risotto I’d made for dinner that I thought was quite delicious, and he though was not done. Not exactly great deliberation material, is it? I must be desperate. What next? Whether to move the recycling bin to the left of the kitchen doorway instead of the right?
When I first sat down to make my plan last Monday, I didn’t think for a moment I’d actually accomplish all of what I’d written by the end of the day. I have absolutely no need to pollute my entire day with that sort of business. But by the end of the week, as I scanned the list…erm…plan…I’d accomplished all but one or two things.
I’m thinking that this qualifies me as some sort of an expert and I should now write an e-book on How to Write and Accomplish a Weekly Plan and charge innocent web surfers $9.99 for it so that they, too, can be accomplished in three easy steps, but I won’t.
No, I’ll sit here instead, thinking about why I don’t feel the need to make myself accountable to me any longer.
I joked with the MoH last week that it must be some sort of Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome left from my career and having to have a plan and lists, and list plans, and plans for plans for everything. Oh, and be accountable to too many people for too many years. “Joked” would be the key word there, but he didn’t laugh. I’m sure you’re not laughing either, but for a very different reason. You’re thinking, “Well shit woman. You don’t have to do anything all day long and you’re still bitching and moaning about it. Get off your fat ass and do something so we don’t have to listen to you whine about how the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” because you wish you were like me sometimes and didn’t have to be accountable to yourself and others either, right?
Maybe I am accountable to me, but it’s so annoying that I resist and do anything but what I know I should do. You have on-going inane conversations with yourself, too, right?
Sometimes it feels as if I’ve got layers of gauze wrapped around my head, muting everything trying to get in, yet keeping what’s already inside tightly there. Each day is filled with options — so many of them I rarely know where to begin, and so don’t, instead going through motions I’ve created over the past two years with the unconscious determination someone who busies themselves with errands each day might engage in. (This is the part where if someone reading this is a compulsive day filler upper, he/she begins to get a bit cranky with me, but forgets I’m talking about myself, and not him/her…)
It’s like I exist on two planes: one that’s physically active, and another that’s engrossed in what my mind really wants to work on. They don’t always cooperate with one another, and the problem is, I can’t quite shake off the active aspect of myself because I might have to actually sit down and write something relevant. I’ve figured out that if I’m active, I can procrastinate quite effectively because my activity interferes with my thinking. Sort of. But if I can persuade myself to avoid business, and just think, I might be able to get somewhere. Anywhere but blathering on and on here, or on scraps of paper that I write on when I’m busy because something’s popped into my head and I don’t want to forget it.
I do forget it, though, and I’m left at the end of the day with a clean house, business taken care of, and no writing.
Maybe I need two lists. One for my crappy, time-consuming chores and errands, and another just for me.
Whatever that means. What would it say?
1) When the urge strikes, go write. Screw everything else.
Not very eloquent, but it does have possibilities.
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