When I come into a new year, be it a new cycle, a new phase in life, or whatever arbitrary beginning I decide feels appropriate, I have a process, and that process is that I have a box for everything. All the bits and parts of me that I could plan and plan around, I box up into a lovely little gift box and tie a neat little bow on top to hand myself like it’s my welcome kit into this new era of life. I have a personal journal for venting, a journal for planning, post-its for grid planning, commonplace notebooks, time-blocked activities, daily checklists, and all the other life-optimization tools under the sun. For a time it worked, and then I got sick for the first two weeks of January, and suddenly none of my systems felt right anymore.
It’s week three of the new year and I’m only just figuring things out again. The systems that worked before now feel arduous. Even just looking at those boxes make me weary. The boxes that were supposed to make things easier for me are now this big monster made of deadlines and performance and resource and work. The thing that I had put together so that it felt fun, and meaningful just felt like work. How does that line go again? “Live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. Even before I got sick, I think my processes had already begun to work against me and it was only when I was forced to step back did I see that I had processes that aligned with my work style, but not with everything else in my life.
I know that systems are supposed to change, and there’s nothing new about editing a process of optimization. Before the year started, I had a plan. Each feeling and thought were categorized, neatly filed into where I thought they needed to be. I’m coming to a thought now, however (and yes, I did indeed write it down in the brain dump journal), that I don’t think I have any desire to be optimized. Admittedly, I’m not exactly working with a fully formed thought, and somehow I think my previous processes are to blame, but I’m not sure I have a need to proverbially “get my life together”, because my life already is.
Together. My life is together. I am the sum of all my parts, parts that need each other to be the sum. My anxiety walks the same path as development estimates as my depression sits alongside my relationships. My dreams of peace don’t apply only to my personal life, and joy looks the same to me regardless of who I’m with. If I really think about it, it’s simple: I had compartmentalized too much of myself. Every part of me was in a lovely little box, in pieces. Now, it’s become difficult to think about the fullness of a thought, or the feeling outside of a category. If I think too hard, in a steeping crisis, I worry about the civil society of boxes within me, and the coup waiting to erupt. It’s difficult to think of the sum of me.
I thought core beliefs were supposed to anchor these processes, measure the boxes for their weight limit before flying. Turns out, after a couple of weeks of being ill and ruminating over my mortality, I’m realizing that it’s not enough for me to have a solid set of core beliefs, that they won’t work if I don’t let the different parts of me commit, or explore, or challenge those beliefs together, that if one part of me falls, the others must fall with it, with grace, with kindness, and with the confidence to say, we are all in the right place.
Some interesting recent things:
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