I find myself with very little to say these days. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t have the time or energy to put it in order. This is a recurring problem for me, particularly of late. Of course, a lot of it is because I’ve been kept on the back foot for a few weeks in a row now. Over the course of the last three weeks I’ve seemingly fallen prey to Murphy’s Law, with things piling up and compounding. I haven’t slept well, I’ve been having trouble thinking straight, and while I’ve avoided missing any particularly egregious deadlines in my classes, I feel more like I’ve been treading water than swimming forward.
Amid all of this, I missed putting up a post last week without noticing. I was actually pretty sure I had done something. In fact, if you’d asked me at the end of last week whether I posted anything, I would have been fairly sure I had already done that. I probably would have bet money on it. And I would’ve been wrong. This isn’t the first or only thing I’ve lost track of in the last few weeks, but it is arguably the biggest; or perhaps better stated, one of the things more resistant to forgetting that I nevertheless forgot.
This is bad. Distraction and confusion on this level is dangerous. This time around it was a missing a post that didn’t go up. Next time it might be a school assignment, which would be bad. Worst case scenario, I might space out and forget about my life support routine. I don’t think it would kill me, but that’s the kind of risk I try very hard not to take. Whatever is causing this fugue, whether that’s a lack of sleep, too much slacking an procrastinating, or not enough productive projects to focus on, needs to be brought under control. People with my condition don’t have the luxury of being distracted. I know this.
Of course, saying something is bad and doing something to solve it are very different. And it’s difficult to turn my life upside down in order to find and eliminate the source of a problem while also going ahead with schoolwork and other plans. So, what’s the plan?
Well, first I need to get ahead in my schoolwork. The plan here is twofold: first, to make sure I’m covered for traveling next weekend. Second, getting ahead will give me the breathing room I need to begin the next set of endeavors. This kind of planning would’ve been impossible in high school, because my teachers were never so organized as to provide expectation ahead of time of what I needed to do, which I think was partially responsible for the tendency for things to snowball. College, however, has proven far easier to navigate, with important items being listed on syllabi well in advance. Consequently, it is possible for me to make plans that include completing work ahead of time.
Second, I need to get my sleep schedule under control. This is a pain, because the only way I have found to reliably enforce a sleep schedule is to wake up early, and force myself out of bed, so that by the time night falls, I feel exhausted enough to fall asleep. This is always a miserable process, because, as I have mentioned previously, I am not a morning person. Waking up early is physically painful to me. I have designed most of my current life around the premise of never needing to wake up before 11am. This will be a sacrifice. But it is necessary.
Third, I need to get up and around more. Winter often has the effect of causing me to spend most of my days inside and sitting down, since I don’t tolerate the cold well enough to go for walks. This, I suspect, is bad for concentration, and it certainly weakens my stamina over time-something I can scarcely afford to lose.
Will I actually accomplish these things? Dunno. But by writing them down and posting them, I’m more likely to try.
