So you'll recall that I promised you a review on one of my all-time favourite series, the Cosmic Trilogy by C. S. Lewis. There is a draft post for the first book sitting here, undone, from over a month ago.
What happened to me? Where are all my ambitions, hopes, and plans?
The following is a short account of how I fell off the wagon.
It all started with an ambitious week. I planned a lot of activity in early May, even though I knew my sisters and cousin would be visiting for a family wedding. I knew that I had time to do all the things I wanted to, and time to sleep. I wanted to finish my blog post, bake bread, go to the wedding, have my family over, talk politics and philosophy with my cousins, keep the garden tidy, go to church and Bible study, keep the house clean, install an air-conditioner, you know, just like an average week. I had 2 extra days off too, so like no stress.
But I forgot one key factor: being with people (even family) makes me TIRED. Not sleepy-tired, but like the kind of tired where I need to not talk to anyone. I want to do absolutely nothing like in the movie Office Space. It's a very insidious kind of tired because after about 2 hours of watching Netflix the guilt starts to trickle in. "I should go get that blog post done". "I should clean up the kitchen." But obviously I don't do it right away. I watch another episode or check FB or just sit and stare at the ceiling, hoping it will motivate me. And now the trickle of "I should"s becomes the old flood of self-admonition that is at once pointless and unstoppable. I don't think it would be accurate to call it self-loathing, because I'm so apathetic about it. Just cannot give a single scheisse about doing any of the things. Obviously I still have to go to work, and that's another excuse for me to not get anything else done in a day. "I worked all night and I only got 4 hours of sleep". Well yeah, you and every other adult on the earth, Becca. The demotivational litany of apathy.
So all this tiredness and procrastination leads to more and more tasks piling up. And suddenly it seems like every time I do a thing (WHOA I DID ONE THING time to celebrate with 4 days of complete lethargy), there are 2 more things that need doing and I can't guilt myself into doing. I went from being confident in my ability to work and have hobbies and friends to unsure about whether I should be allowed to care for plants, all within the span of about 3 weeks.
TL;DR - I over-estimated my ability to handle a very busy time, and then completely ditched all but my most urgent responsibilities and of course all my leisure activities.
So now what do I do? I have 5 books in my car that I do want to read, but I'm tired and it's more work to read them than to watch endless episodes of American Dad (which I don't even find funny). I've planted half my garden but weeding seems like it will take hours but I don't have hours, only like 10 minutes. I told my dad that I'd write some advertising material for him but all of my awake hours feel blurry and laboured, not like the best time to write about beetles.
We all know what the answer to this is, right? Because there is a right answer. The big goals are too big for me to focus on, so I'll need to start with the little ones. Instead of trying to write about the Cosmic Trilogy, which has influenced the most primary levels of my thoughts and philosophy, I will start with some short stories by Jack London which I can read in 15 minutes and are about wolves and survival. Nice cosy life-and-death kinds of things. Instead of trying to tell myself that the kitchen has to be clean today, I will empty the dishwasher because that takes like 2 minutes and has a defined end-point. I will celebrate the victories with non-destructive treats, like finding a movie that I want to watch and not telling myself I shouldn't watch it while watching it. So this is me grabbing a pen and resetting the TI-83 that calculates what I expect of myself. I'm not going to expect less overall, but I'm going to stop adding all this backlog of past missed deadlines into the equation. There, done. The wagon is back on track and I am definitely on the wagon and I'm definitely done mixing metaphors.
Up next: Short Stories by Jack London and maybe some by Neil Gaiman or A. A. Milne. I've been really digging the short stories.
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