I don't feel like writing at all tonight. I would far prefer to be huddled on the couch watching mindless TV, but I am on a mission to find some stability and health. Since I know writing is good for my heart, I have promised myself 20 minutes daily of either writing on Prosebox or filling out my morning pages.
Unlike my dear friend, LittleBlackDress (shout out to some writing and fashion genius here), I have never been great at sticking to routines. If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) personality profiling, I'm an ENFP/J and that 1% that leans more "P" than "J" bugs me. My 49% J pines so much for the following:
- neat schedules
- routines
- checkboxes
- lists
- goal completion
However, more often than not, my 51% P actually has me do the following:
- leave a square of chocolate in the washer so that I have to wash everything twice
- forego morning pages for more sleep and The Colbert Report
- buy plane tickets- though I can neither afford the time nor the money- and fly off to see a friend just because it occurs to me that I miss him.
- grow a garden for half a season and then let everything go to seed
- spend a whole winter learning to knit hats, and just when I am beginning to feel like a proficient, I give up on the whole damn thing
- spend hours and hours and hours planning in excruciating detial all the things I need to do in a week just to decide the next day that I will eat pancakes and go to the movies with my nephew instead
I do, most often, get around to fulfilling most of my important goals. That 49% "J" keeps me tethered, but also makes me feel horrible guilty. One of my deepest failings is distraction, and to battle it, I often line up the obligations in a janga sort of way. If I misstep, the whole thing tumbles, so I must keep hyper-focused. Unfortunately, this also means an inevitable health crash of some sort.
I'd so much rather be Hilary Clinton, but instead, I am Bridget Jones with a blasse mid-American accent. Oh, to be DISCIPLINED and quiet and thoughtful and consistent and poised and clean-at-all-times! A scholar.
I am particularly concerned about all of this as I prepare for a semester of Hell. I finally received my schedule from the institution where I am employed, and I learned that I am teaching 5 sections with 2 new classes. I have to completely organize these preps and attend all of the required training and social gatherings in the next seven days. No wonder I've been experiencing the nearly crippling tension/pressure headaches/jaw aches/ear aches and fatigue I get sometimes when the VOD begins its paralyzing descent. I know that somehow I must balance this semester and really adhere to self care rather than flying hell bent into the fray of school and rushing from fire to fire to fire and then getting very ill and staying in bed for three weeks during break.
Two of my largest life goals are is to learn to balance and to appreciate the complicated and contrary internal sensibility that keeps me striving for achievement (and some weird personally defined notion of perfection) and yet also, sometimes even more strongly, wants to wander through the world picking daisies.
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