today in things everybody else knew before I did
I came to a weird realization on Sunday that in retrospect is the most hilariously obvious thing but at the time was clearly not, and it sort of ties in to the thinking I've been doing about my goals and how I'm approaching/achieving them, and where I am in comparison to the goals I set myself for the year, and what I want to choose for my goals for next year.
I was kicking around the house on Sunday and I thought, hey, maybe I'll watch some stuff off the TiVo. For the record, before I sat down to start cleaning it up, the TiVo contained:
* 2 episodes of Criminal Minds
* 6 episodes of NCIS
* 15 episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles
* 12 episodes of Agents of SHIELD
* 19 episodes of The Blacklist
* 6 episodes of Grimm
This was after I already decided that I was over NCIS: New Orleans and deleted it all. Paladin is way ahead of me; he was 4 episodes ahead on The Blacklist and had watched all of SHIELD during the last year, he just left them on the TiVo for me to catch up to. (We won't talk about me now being 2 full seasons behind on The Good Wife which I stopped recording and just buy from iTunes because of shenanigans with timing.)
ANYWAY, the realization was that for most of the past two years I've been too stressed out to watch TV. (This manifests in some weird ways for me; I'm not too stressed out to play FF14 most of the time, but I think that's because of the MMO model of constant incremental progress, so the time I spend on FF14 feels like it's more productive for an equivalent degree of input.) And then I go, "but how can I be too stressed out for that?" and then I look back and go, well, I went from planning a wedding to shopping for/buying a house to moving to running DCP and basically spent two years at breakneck speed. I look at myself and go "but I'm 40K behind on my word goals and on most of my other goals too" and then it's like, I have spent a ludicrous amount of time for the past two years buried in ~doing stuff~ and then, yes, I effectively fell over for three months and stared blankly at walls or did quick-hit things like short hidden-object games and books (I'm a very fast reader so I can rip through my book backlog pretty fast when I put my mind to it). I literally have two years' worth of magazines piled up waiting for me to have time to read them, although in fairness to me I did go through like six of them last week.
One of the funny things about this to me is that everyone I know probably knew this before I did; I commented on it to paladin in the tone of "I just figured out a thing!" and he just sort of looked at me as though I were a green rabbit and said "Well, yes." But it was not at all obvious to me at the time; there were things that needed doing and I did (many of) them. And then, too, I sort of...aspire to be the busy person of "if you want something done give it to a busy person." In my warped brain (and its consistent moving of goalposts; see also my retrospective on NaNoWrimo 2013) then if I'm not constantly having too little time to do everything and getting most of it done anyway, I'm clearly not getting anything done.
This manifests itself in a handful of ways that are just sort of headshake-inducing, and which have mutated over the years (I used to overcommit myself to: participating in fanfic exchanges and running and/or playing in tabletop games; I constantly try to take on Big Projects and then wig out when they crush me). A lot of it is that I'm persistently applying a much higher standard to myself than I would ever contemplate applying to anyone else I know. And yet, as I look at the past three months, when I've been slowly straightening out myself as all the stuff I took on in the last couple years gets wrapped up and put away, it seems like I'm getting more done. It's possible that this is just subjective, but at the very least it's probably healthier for me, since it means that I don't react with "oh god why" and tears when a new thing I (want to/need to/could) do presents itself. But I have time to play more games (I've been doing very well on my backlog-tackling this year! And I'm making such progress in FF14!), and I've read so many books this year - a casual estimate says I'm already past the 50 book mark excluding things I've re-read - and okay, so maybe I'm not making as much progress as I'd like erasing my deficit for GYWO, and I'm really behind on actually posting fic, but on the other hand I'm continuing to make words and move closer to my goal of submitting a novel for publication, and the idea of editing my stuff just frustrates me and makes me snark at past-me instead of wanting to cry at how impossible the entire concept is.
Being nice to yourself and giving yourself permission to relax: turns out that's good for you? WHO KNEW. (everyone but me.)
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1126623.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
I was kicking around the house on Sunday and I thought, hey, maybe I'll watch some stuff off the TiVo. For the record, before I sat down to start cleaning it up, the TiVo contained:
* 2 episodes of Criminal Minds
* 6 episodes of NCIS
* 15 episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles
* 12 episodes of Agents of SHIELD
* 19 episodes of The Blacklist
* 6 episodes of Grimm
This was after I already decided that I was over NCIS: New Orleans and deleted it all. Paladin is way ahead of me; he was 4 episodes ahead on The Blacklist and had watched all of SHIELD during the last year, he just left them on the TiVo for me to catch up to. (We won't talk about me now being 2 full seasons behind on The Good Wife which I stopped recording and just buy from iTunes because of shenanigans with timing.)
ANYWAY, the realization was that for most of the past two years I've been too stressed out to watch TV. (This manifests in some weird ways for me; I'm not too stressed out to play FF14 most of the time, but I think that's because of the MMO model of constant incremental progress, so the time I spend on FF14 feels like it's more productive for an equivalent degree of input.) And then I go, "but how can I be too stressed out for that?" and then I look back and go, well, I went from planning a wedding to shopping for/buying a house to moving to running DCP and basically spent two years at breakneck speed. I look at myself and go "but I'm 40K behind on my word goals and on most of my other goals too" and then it's like, I have spent a ludicrous amount of time for the past two years buried in ~doing stuff~ and then, yes, I effectively fell over for three months and stared blankly at walls or did quick-hit things like short hidden-object games and books (I'm a very fast reader so I can rip through my book backlog pretty fast when I put my mind to it). I literally have two years' worth of magazines piled up waiting for me to have time to read them, although in fairness to me I did go through like six of them last week.
One of the funny things about this to me is that everyone I know probably knew this before I did; I commented on it to paladin in the tone of "I just figured out a thing!" and he just sort of looked at me as though I were a green rabbit and said "Well, yes." But it was not at all obvious to me at the time; there were things that needed doing and I did (many of) them. And then, too, I sort of...aspire to be the busy person of "if you want something done give it to a busy person." In my warped brain (and its consistent moving of goalposts; see also my retrospective on NaNoWrimo 2013) then if I'm not constantly having too little time to do everything and getting most of it done anyway, I'm clearly not getting anything done.
This manifests itself in a handful of ways that are just sort of headshake-inducing, and which have mutated over the years (I used to overcommit myself to: participating in fanfic exchanges and running and/or playing in tabletop games; I constantly try to take on Big Projects and then wig out when they crush me). A lot of it is that I'm persistently applying a much higher standard to myself than I would ever contemplate applying to anyone else I know. And yet, as I look at the past three months, when I've been slowly straightening out myself as all the stuff I took on in the last couple years gets wrapped up and put away, it seems like I'm getting more done. It's possible that this is just subjective, but at the very least it's probably healthier for me, since it means that I don't react with "oh god why" and tears when a new thing I (want to/need to/could) do presents itself. But I have time to play more games (I've been doing very well on my backlog-tackling this year! And I'm making such progress in FF14!), and I've read so many books this year - a casual estimate says I'm already past the 50 book mark excluding things I've re-read - and okay, so maybe I'm not making as much progress as I'd like erasing my deficit for GYWO, and I'm really behind on actually posting fic, but on the other hand I'm continuing to make words and move closer to my goal of submitting a novel for publication, and the idea of editing my stuff just frustrates me and makes me snark at past-me instead of wanting to cry at how impossible the entire concept is.
Being nice to yourself and giving yourself permission to relax: turns out that's good for you? WHO KNEW. (everyone but me.)
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1126623.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.