Putting Myself At the Top of The List

I remember the first time I heard the term "self-care." From a psychologist, naturally. I remember being flummoxed, thinking "Huh. Now what does that mean?"

I shudder to think how not care-ful I used to be (sometimes still can be) with myself. I was the high emperor of powering through, staying up all night, forgetting to eat until I was ready to collapse. I was my own slavedriver, poised above the sled yelling mush! mush! Faster into the night!

I see now some of what it was about. It was about saying yes to everybody so that they would love and approve of and be pleased with me. It was about asking for permission to be alive, to exist. It was about having no clue who I was. It was about the Cinderella thing, and the martyr thing, and a general lack of control and/or self-worth.

I remember that the psychologist wouldn't pin down for me exactly what taking care of oneself meant. As always, I was looking for someone else to give me the rules to follow. Eventually I figured out that it's tricky, because it means different things to different people, and even different things to the same person depending on the situation, the day, the hour.

Pressing the Reset Button

Last night I sat down and had a talk with myself. As my earlier blog entry attests, it had been a rather brutal week. I let an urgent deadline at work send me off the deep end. The worst part was not the external obligations but the internal racket - - a firestorm of fear-mongering, nay-saying, and pessimism. I put myself in a jail of my own making.

Luckily, last night, I decided to break out. Thanks in part to a post at another blog that reminded me to watch how I talk to myself, buster, I decided to take back control!

I did a post-mortem and attempted to figure out how I could prevent the same kind of self-inflicted torture this week. Here are the minutes from the meeting with myself:

1. Don't forget the thing about the airplanes.  I.e., course correction. A friend told me that although it looks like airplanes are flying in a straight line, they are actually constantly making slight, side-to-side course corrections the entire time they are flying. People can do that too, with goal being the the course corrections become smaller with time.

2. Leechblock: Use it in good health. When the urge to procrastinate is strong, you have to outsmart yourself - this tool lets you be your own time-suck police by imposing limits on when you can visit which web sites. It requires a certain amount of self-knowledge to enter the right information, of course, and it's still no good unless you have...


3. A commitment to an outcome. The most important difference between last week and this week is that I've had it up to here with all the mealy-mouthed whining. I am strong! I've survived and come out on top after all kinds of crap. I know what it takes. It's time to get real and do what I know to do.

Now that I got clear about what I do (and don't) want out of my working/waking life, it's up to me to make it happen. And so far: progress. I meditated, I was productive, I bought 2 skirts and 2 tops at the thrift store's 50% off sale, I wrestled the floor-laundry into being closet-laundry. I even managed a tiny, microscopic jog.

I think the take-home here is about taking ownership of your own life. In a small way, it's about being the hero of your own story. Acting upon your environment instead of being acted upon. Turning from object to subject of the sentence. Mountains, journeys, soaring eagles, wolverines. All that stuff.

Adjusting My Life Arithmetic

 

Here and here are two great posts at the Harvard Business Review about being mindful of what we add, and what we can subtract, from our lives. A similar notion is life coach Cheryl Richardson's Absolute Yes list – those things that are most important for you to focus on over the next few months.

Both speak to that insidious way that, if you’re not conscious about what you put into your day (and therefore, your life), it’s likely that any old thing will slip in there.

My To-Subtract List

• mediocre sitcoms (They’re so easy to watch! So mildly amusing!)

• the dreaded f-word (facebook- seriously, do I need to know what random people from my freshman year dorm are up to? Do I?)

• checking my email 6,000 times only to delete one new message that is usually from a random mailing list I’m on.

• reading newspaper websites as an excuse for procrastination (but look Ma! It’s educational!)

Note that all these time-sucks are all related to a big light-up screen. And they’re easy! They happen at the click of a button, the tap of a mouse, and frequently result in a rewarding squirt of dopamine. (See article about email compulsion.)

By contrast, a lot of the things that are on my Yes List don’t offer that same instant gratification. 

My Yes List

• Applying to grad school. Important step toward a rewarding career, but frankly? Bit of a drag. I'm sorry my life doesn't fit precisely into the boxes you've created for it, ApplyYourself online application program!

• Bringing in the cash-monies. Again, solvency, and the food and shelter it provides, is pretty key to the kind of lifestyle I want to be leading (you know, the kind with a roof. And a shower. And breakfast.) And don’t get me wrong, in this economy I’m lucky and grateful to have an income stream, but still…it’s no Big Bang Theory.

• Friendships. This is one that at least has a more immediate payoff, in that I truly enjoy time spent with good people. But even this one can’t happen at one push of a button. There’s coordination that must be done, decisions to make, hours of coffee shops to look up, schedules and timing to consider.

• Meditation. I am proud to say that I have managed to sit quietly in the morning for 10-20 minutes almost every single day for that past few months, and it really has been transformational in terms of my chilling out and getting some perspective. But again, I enjoy the rewards, and sometimes the process itself can be lovely and interesting. Other times though, sitting and listening to my own mind is like watching a twisted, panicked circus sideshow of paranoia and low self-esteem.

To Add

  

Typing out my list like that made me realize that it's long on goals and responsibilities and kind of short on you know, fun. Maybe it's time to add a category for relaxing in a way that really does replenish me and not just send me into an LCD stupor.

Et toi? What are you trying to add and subtract from your day (and the microcosm of your life it represents)? What's on your lists? What do you do when you're in the mood for fun? (I'm not just curious, I'm looking for ideas.)