Day 3 - are we relaxed yet?
Originally published at Champagne and Socks. You can comment here or there.
So. I have a meeting first thing in the morning. That I can’t be late for. So I’ve been trying to get to bed earlyish, sleep lots and then get up early. The puppy clearly read the memo as he did not allow me to go back to sleep *at all* once C left for work. At 7am. Yeah. And then by 9am, that puppy was snoozing away on his first *of many* naps for the day. Bastard.
So I was up before 8 having my coffee and reading. And then I spent the next few hours reading and watching a couple of episodes of Twin Peaks. I *meant* to do more today. I honestly thought I could both relax and just knock off a few tasks, catch up a bit on TPP. I did quite a bit yesterday that it felt weird to have no oomph today.
Just before 3pm, I had my anxiety attack - I was going to bake! I was going to cook soup for dinner! I was going to finish the unpacking! And all I’d managed was one load of washing. So I got up and actually got a bit of unpacking done - two boxes [1] unpacked which dramatically reduced the remaining mess. I have only three large boxes left. And interesting, I finally decided, a week or so ago, to throw out large amounts of my PhD stuff and then today I found my aborted postgrad project (I started one and then it got taken off me for political reasons and I got a new one) - all kinds of paperwork and research reading. Why the hell did I keep that? And move it in and out of about 7 different places since 1999? Inquiring minds want to know.[2]
It is freeing to be separating myself from all this *stuff* - it’s just stuff that I have schlepped with me from place to place, as though having it itself makes up part of my identity. So much of it is guiltridden - things unfinished that I don’t want to finish. It’s nice to be drawing a line under a lot of this stuff, casting it off as *not part of me* and allowing myself to move on and give myself (physical and mental) space to be who I want to be.
So that was my day really. I did bake banana bread in the end. And get some dishes washed. I did keep going over to the pile of stuff still to be sorted and unpacked and vaguely pick through it. It occurs to me that I need to learn to be able to say “enough” - to work on something and be able to put it down as enough done for today. I don’t do that with anything, ever. I feel like if I am awake and not doing something, I could be working on something or tidying something or catching up on something or sewing something. I never think “well hey, I did this today” or “I got a chunk of this done” now I can go off and read. Or go to bed early. Or whatever. I don’t ever do that. Maybe if I did, I would be able to relax more and maybe I’d be able to stop and actually log what I do achieve instead of focussing on what I have left to achieve. Maybe my Week To Do List needs to be cut down into reasonable day lists.
Back to work tomorrow.
[1] My mixing up all the boxes when I packed has been interesting. My stuff has lost its “mineness” - that recognisable thing where you move from house to house and everything goes back essentially where it was cept the desk is different or the kitchen drawers are in a different space. But when you suddenly mix things up so half a drawer is in one box and half in another, your attachment kinda wanes because you have to look at each individual object rather than the whole on mass. I’ve mananged to part with a lot more crap this way. Also, mixing the boxes meant that almost every box had half of it as easy to unpack. Means I’ve unpacked a lot more.
[2] Yesterday I threw away a lot of stuff from my memory box (you know where you keep letters and photos and love notes and cards) from the ex. His love notes made me feel sick. I don’t need the photos or thank you cards to us from things. But I do wonder, now I have thrown those away, when I am old, will I be sad that I don’t have them? Like, did I erase it from my personal history? On the other hand, I’m not ever going to be important enough that people will need/want to trawl through the paperwork of my life. Surely. My grandkids will just have to hear the stories from me, I guess. Heh.