100indecisions | ha ha whoops (Reply)

Tumblr didn't completely flame out when we all kind of expected it to, and I forgot I was trying to remember to cross-post some things. well...I just wrote up a "vague goals for 2020" post, so...I guess I'm cross-posting that now.

it took me a little while to write anything summarizing the past decade (more impressive than just the previous year) and then I still meant to write something about goals for 2020, and now it’s February and I only just finished writing this post but you know what, that is fine, especially given that I’ve been thinking about some of this stuff for…I don’t know, a while.

so…goals. I don’t think I’ve ever made actual New Year resolutions because I know myself well enough to know I’d be setting myself up for failure, but I’ve usually had some vague goals in mind anyway. and if I focus on specific things, most of it really isn’t new. it’s like…finish more fics (especially short fics). finish more games (especially short games, free games, and walking simulators, double-especially when those categories overlap). get ADHD help. exercise consistently. figure out more stuff to list on Etsy that hits the magic sweet spot of reasonable effort-to-profit ratio (ideally, something I can make a lot of and then just sell, which I was hoping the Pride Cap stuff would be but there hasn’t been a lot of interest). somehow get my room into functional shape, which means organizing but also requires getting rid of a ton of shit so I actually have room for things. finish more personal customizing/craft projects, particularly more Loki figures. do what I can for the 2020 elections, gulp. but also, get enough sleep so I’m not exhausted ALL THE TIME, and try to manage my stress levels better, so basically if I want to do all of this, it boils down to “learn to manage my time perfectly, somehow”.

and like…those are good goals, in theory. I will definitely at least do some of those things. ideally I will do all of them, although that seems kind of unlikely, given that “more” is really not specific enough (but being specific is also hard, because it requires a lot of thought and decisions ahead of time and that’s also stressful…and it means I can concretely fall short, instead of being able to decide “no, actually, I did do enough to qualify for my vague goals so guess what brain, you can shut up”). on one level or another these are all things I want to do, even.

but the thing about a list like this is…well, it’s a list of goals, first of all, not a plan for achieving those goals, and that’s hard for the same reason being more specific is hard. Trying to make plans and concrete goals kind of makes my brain panic, which I hope is part of the whole ADHD thing so maybe I can get help for that, who knows. The bigger thing is that this list of goals isn’t really new, as I mentioned, which indicates I haven’t done too well in recent years at knocking off anything on the list, and it’s also…missing the bigger picture.

I have this idea, right, that if I let myself get away with not doing things I should do, I’ll have no motivation to do the things. in theory that sounds kind of reasonable, but what it means in practice is that when I fuck up, I hate myself for it. I’m a little better about this than I used to be–back in college I distinctly remember that I would berate myself for stuff as small as not finding the closest parking spot, and I recognized how ridiculous that was and mostly managed to stop. but I still do it with the chronic issues I can’t seem to get away from, like always being tired because I never get to bed at a good time, or often being late to appointments, or getting stressed over deadlines because I wait until the last minute to do most of the work, or how my room is a disaster and I hate the fact that I can’t find anything but I don’t know what to do about it because there’s not enough room for everything and I want to keep all of it, or meaning to work out but instead scrolling Tumblr on my phone for a while until it’s so late I just need to go home, or frequently getting charged interest on my credit cards because I don’t stay on top of paying them off, or spending a ton of time re-reading fic or scrolling Tumblr and using up all the time I could’ve spent on things I actually needed or wanted to do, or losing money because I didn’t think of something obvious or slacked off on preventative measures or forgot about a good coupon/deal until after it expired, or missing out on an opportunity because I forgot about it or kept putting it off, or getting awful headaches every weekend because I spend too much time in bed and then too much time just kind of fucking around on the computer or my phone and let myself get dehydrated, or having big plans of actually accomplishing things over the weekend and not doing them for the same reason, or…well, any of the other ways I fall short. and if the specific instance is unusually bad/consequential, or my brain is already bad from something else and I get into a spiral of fixating on all the ways I fall short, I basically just…get stuck on the self-loathing. and even when I recognize I’m doing this and it’s not good, I think part of the reason I have such a hard time breaking out of the spiral is that idea that I can’t just let myself get away with fucking up and failing to do things because how else will I learn to stop?

there’s probably a lot of mess in my upbringing (conservative evangelical/fundie stuff in general, my family specifically, and then the ways all those issues were exacerbated or at least perpetuated by my two years at a private Christian school and four years in a weird leadership track of the Honors program in college) that could be blamed for this, and it’s the sort of thing I’ve unpacked some with therapists and should do so again, assuming I can ever find a long-term therapist lolsob. and again, there’s a kernel of a reasonable idea in there: there are loads of things I don’t necessarily want to do but that are important to do anyway, and other things where the process isn’t necessarily the most fun but the end result is genuinely worth it, so I can’t just…decide that it’s fine if I never do anything. like, for extremely obvious reasons, I can’t decide I’m going to practice self-care by quitting my job and spending every day on the couch playing video games, or that I’m never going to walk my dog unless I feel like it, or that I’m going to stop doing the exercises that might help my neck/head pain in the long term because I dislike them in the short term. equally, I don’t want to quit every game I play the second I get a little frustrated, because then I would literally never finish any of them, including all my favorites; I don’t want to quit writing just because some parts aren’t actively fun; I want to complete more customizing/craft projects even if that process also isn’t always actively fun. and sometimes it’s tough to recognize the difference, when it’s healthy to say “actually I’m not going to push myself on this” and when it’s important to say “yeah, this isn’t fun, but the result is worth it so we’re gonna push it anyway”. it’s often really tough, in fact! probably trying to figure out this difference is something else I need to bring up with a therapist, because obviously I have a very hard time identifying it!

but. but. engaging in what is essentially (mostly subconscious, but still) self-harm by hating myself for fucking up–well, even if we’re looking at it from a solely practical perspective, there’s a big and obvious problem that you may have noticed from the long list of things I keep doing even as I know I shouldn’t:

if punishing myself with self-loathing is a necessary deterrent for various ways of fucking up, but also I keep fucking up in the exact same ways, then obviously it doesn’t fucking work. not only that, it’s actively counter-productive, because when I start hating myself for fucking up, I become incapable of doing pretty much anything—all my energy gets absorbed into the spiral of self-loathing. and honestly I’m probably also teaching my brain to associate these things I need to do with the pain of hating myself for not doing them, which makes my negative response to those things even stronger.

this boils down to something really simple that I’ve been trying to get through my skull: I cannot hate myself into becoming a better person. I shouldn’t, for many reasons, but I also just can’t, as in it literally isn’t possible, and I think I’ve pretty conclusively proven that, based on the fact that…you know…I’m still fucking up in all the exact same ways. so I can’t hate myself into becoming a better person. and that leaves, maybe, trying to forgive myself more, and work with myself instead of focusing on how I should be doing things, and trying not to feel apologetic or guilty for having preferences or not being “good enough” or what the fuck ever.

I want to work on a lot of things, yeah. I’m dissatisfied with a lot of things that are, in theory, within my power to fix, so I would like to do what I can to fix them. but instead of constantly getting down on myself for being slow with everything, for instance, maybe I can say that I tend to be methodical and I like to take my time. (and also for instance, instead of shitting on myself for posting this at the beginning of February, I can just shrug because years are a human construct and it seriously doesn’t matter.) instead of feeling like I should preface anything I say about most of my interests with a disclaimer that I know it’s silly, maybe I can…not do that, and just have hobbies and preferences. instead of hating myself every time I fuck up, maybe I can forgive myself and try again.

so. that’s what I want to try to do more in 2020. apologize less for existing. forgive myself more. maybe get some shit done in the process.