Procrastinating Perfectionism

If there were a Procrastinators Anonymous, I would so join. Tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

I am especially guilty of procrastinating not only unpleasant tasks, but also tasks which could be highly rewarding but which carry with them the possibility of failure (or success), and so it's easier to put them off than to deal with that.

Like writing. Writing is a luxury. It really is. Instead of having to work at a fast food restaurant to make money to pay rent, or even at a higher level position in which I could gain acclaim and make a decent living, I get to write. It's a total luxury. Sometimes that makes me feel guilty. Heck, OFTEN that makes me feel guilty. I'm not even a published writer and don't have deadlines to which I have to work, so I feel even MORE guilty that, for right now at least, this is a fun hobby. My husband is at work right now, probably doing stuff he doesn't necessarily enjoy so that he can support us, and I'm home taking care of a million things, but not making us any money.

Therefore I often feel as if the things that contribute most to the household, or the kids, or my kids' school, ought to come first. It's hard to put myself first. Last year I failed miserably in keeping up with working out, partly because it was always easy to cut that out, figuring other things were more important (and frankly, I don't enjoy sweating. Honest enough for you?). I also failed at writing, managing to find many other things to fill up my days than work on the novel I've started.

Even saying I've started a novel feels so pretentious!

But I have. I have started a book. And even if no one else likes it - heck, even if no one else ever READS it - I want to finish it. To prove I can. To challenge that rather loud voice in my head that keeps screaming, "YOU can't be an AUTHOR! You've never even taken writing classes! You weren't an English major! You don't work as a freelancer or anything! Who are YOU to think you could succeed in that? Only real GROWN-UPs higher/better than YOU do that!"

What can I say? It's a nasty voice.

This fall I promised myself I would put myself first in terms of a) working out, and b) writing. The former is going fairly well - missed two days last week, but have gone more days than not, so that's definitely progress. The writing? I keep SAYING I'm going to do it, and then... I don't. I even told myself at the beginning of the year even if it's "only a blog post" I was going to write. And yet have daily missives from me arrived here? Am I that much farther in my book? No.

What gives, Anne?

In all honesty, I DO have a lot of other things to do and responsibilities to take care of. There have been medical appointments and vet visits and grocery shopping for this new wheat-free/casein-free/egg-free diet we've suddenly adopted. There have been errands to run, dishes to do, school needs to fill. That's all true. I have a lot to do and may have even bitten off more than I can chew with some of the things I've taken on.

Still, no excuses. It is SO HARD for me to not feel like a failure if I "mess up" on whatever I've planned for myself. So even though I made an "easier" schedule for myself this fall, the fact that I didn't work out two days last week and haven't written a thing beyond slightly amusing Facebook status updates has me kicking myself and letting that nasty voice above run on repeat.

But guess what, Stinky Voice Monster? I just wrote a blog post. Sure, it's completely been stream-of-conscious spewing with little organization or editing, but I wrote it. So there.

Progress, not perfection. Progress, NOT procrastination. Procrastination is just perfectionism in sheep's clothing.

Baaa.

The Mores of Hair

I've been thinking about the mores of hair for a few weeks. So much so that I decided maybe I'd just blog about it, to get those thoughts out of my head so I can go back to thinking of more important things, such as what's next for Walter White in "Breaking Bad." Although I could write a lot about the use of his hair or lack of it to convey character development, as well. But I won't.

See, I guess I've been thinking about hair because I'm aging. My once gloriously thick hair is thinning. I discover loose strands on my person all the time. And I find myself thinking more and more I should just cut it short. "Older women seem to always go for the short cut," I've been telling myself, "so maybe it's time to bite the bullet." Only I'm not ready to cut it that short again, even though I had the trendy short hair of the late 80's and 90's, because now in 2012, my face is much fatter and I hold on to the belief that my shoulder-length hair somehow helps detract from my double chin. (C'mon, people, let me keep believing that, will you?)

I've kept my hair this length for a few years now. I've been inching it up a little bit closer to chin level in the past few months to try to keep it short enough that I can't pull it back into a ponytail (because not only is that not the least bit flattering to my big face, but also I noticed that it was contributing to the hair loss, based on the huge number of hairs I would pull out daily after removing the pony tail holder), but long enough to still ameliorate said chin.

Some time ago, while looking through old Facebook photos, I found a snapshot of me when I had longer hair (yes, it's up there on the right). Granted, it's never been truly long - no Crystal Gayle floor-length locks, or even mid-back tresses for me. But in my early thirties I had let it grow down a few inches beyond the shoulders - mostly because I was so busy and exhausted by my challenging first-born that I had neither the time nor the energy to go a salon, so I just let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. And in the snapshot, I looked gorgeous. I tried to convince myself it was the hair. If I just let my hair grow longer like that, I would look like that again, right? Never mind that the photo was 7 years and 30 pounds ago. It's all about the hair.

So I mentioned this pic to my mom and said, "Maybe I'll grow my hair longer again." Her response was a quick and vehement "No!" She continued in a somewhat disgusted tone, "Long hair doesn't look good on women of a certain age!" It was a visceral reaction on her part, and it cracked me up, in part because I've always had that same belief and in part because when did I become a woman of a certain age?

But still, where did this belief come from? Apparently for me it came from my mom. My step dad was quick to say I should wear my hair however I want to and what other people think be damned (his common response to most questions or debates on social standards)! One other person to whom I mentioned this gut feeling that older women ought to have shorter hair quirked her eyebrow at me quizzically and said, "Really?" Clearly not everyone agrees with mom and me.

I'm sure there are academic treatises written on the mores of hair. Well, maybe - when I googled it, surprisingly I came up with no strong hits (beyond one blog in which a woman was speculating on how the length of a woman's hair often is seen as determining sexiness, which does actually kind of go to my point). Were I working here with my scholarly cap on, maybe I'd spend more time researching this question about "hair rules for women" in different societies throughout different historical periods. I actually like the idea of doing that, but I'm blogging, not professorializing - which is basically my excuse for being lazy and not investigating this beyond my own thoughts and experiences today. Sue me.

But it does seem the case, loosely said, that for much of western history, longer hair on women has been associated with youth, with vitality, with sexuality. As women age, we seem to be expected to put our hair up, as they did in the "olden days" in buns or braids around the head, what have you, or, in more modern times, to cut it off. To wear it more closely cropped to the head. Of course there are exceptions - I think immediately of flapper hairstyles of the 1920's and the short perms of the 1980's that many young women wore, but those seem to also be a statement, a representation of rebellion against social norms, and of times when women, in striving for more rights, often resorted to fashion which made them appear more masculine (straight-lined flapper dresses, the 80's pin-striped suits).

Longer hair on older woman is often perceived as not as attractive. I've heard some women say long hair on older females makes them look even older, not younger, because our faces have started to sag and the hair just emphasizes that. Maybe. Maybe older women are tired of dealing with longer hair and keeping it short is just easier, regardless of what pop culture may say? As we lose our high estrogen levels going through perimenopause and menopause itself, I know brain research has shown we tend, as women, to become a lot less concerned at a biochemical level (read The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine) about what people think about us. Which I guess means we probably become less concerned about social expectations in general, although we still seem to follow the hair one. But is that because it's an expected custom for us to cut our hair off, or has it become one because we decided it was just easier to have it short?

I don't know. It seems a rite of passage, this permanent cutting off of the hair. Like admitting, I'm really older now. I'm done trying to be a sexy young thing. I'm past child-bearing age and don't need to project my sexuality in that way anymore. Is that true? Or is that just one more example of my warped thinking? You do still see some older Hollywood actresses holding on to their long manes, but then again, they're also trying to hold on to their youth because being an older woman apparently is the kiss of death in terms of desirability in Hollywood (yes, in both sexual and professional terms). To most of them I just want to say, "You're not fooling anyone! Madonna, we all KNOW you're in your 50's - stop trying to convince us you're not by dressing like a 20 year old and wearing gloves to cover up the old lady veins you now sport." (Um, no, I'm not always kind in my thoughts toward others. Something else to work on, I guess.)

I'm not ready to do it yet. I'm not ready to cut it off and step over into that post-estrogen phase. And that's O.K. I'm 40. Not 80. Many, many 40+ women look gorgeous with medium to long hair. They really do. They look younger than women of the same age from generations past - in part because life is generally physically easier, probably, but we're also armed with more knowledge on better nutrition, the importance of exercising, and a vast arsenal of chemicals we slather on our faces in hopes that they will minimize wrinkles and mitigate the reality that we are no longer the 20-somethings we still feel like on the inside. Women also wait longer to go grey now, meaning of course that they color their hair, and this seems socially acceptable right up through senior citizenship.

So I guess since I'm still standing on the threshhold of this new post-fertility stage of life, I can keep mine at shoulder length for a while longer yet. I just don't dare grow it longer, or mom will be after me with scissors.

Whew. Now I can move on to more important things. Like playing CastleVille.

(And as a last side note, when I was musing about this out loud to my husband, I asked him whether 'mores' was always plural, or if one could have a singular 'more'? I went on to say I thought hair length on women was an example of a social 'more', to which he replied, "No. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, THAT's amore...")

Balancing Act

Do you ever have that feeling - even in the midst of being productive - that you should be doing something else? I do. All the time. It's multi-tasking in overdrive, a monster perhaps created from our current culture, in which doing one thing at a time no longer seems to be valued. Or perhaps it's a symptom of anxiety. It's definitely a fixture of my over-active, worrying brain. I never feel as if I'm doing enough. And it drives me nuts.

I can be standing in the kitchen loading the dryer, and be thinking I should be putting the dishes away, or answering that e-mail, or writing on my book, or running those errands. I can be sitting at the computer working on legitimate stuff (if blogging can be called legitimate?), feeling as if I should be cleaning out the basement or finally filling out Ellie's baby book, or any other number of things. 

Why is it so hard for me to focus on and be happy with the moment? To do one thing at a time? To be satisfied with doing one thing at a time, instead of constantly berating myself for what I'm NOT getting done? The stress I create for myself with this hand-wringing "You've got so much to do and you need to be doing it all RIGHT NOW" belief often leads me to just...check out. I paralyze myself with everything I feel I should be doing, and so I don't do any of it. Or at least not very much of it. I figure I'll just check Facebook, or eat some chocolate, or play CastleVille, and suddenly, whoosh, there's no time left. Not exactly helping the "You've got too much to do!" feelings.

I'm happier checking out. Maybe that's a clue to the problem. If I focus on one thing at a time, will I *gasp* actually have to do it? If I say I'm going to set aside one hour every day to work on my novel and not do anything else at that time, will I actually get something done? Horrors!

I do think partly that I, like most Americans, have too much to do, or at least too much I expect myself to do. I don't know what is realistic in terms of what most people can accomplish in a day. Not only do I have a lot of things I'm expected to do, I have a lot of things I WANT to do, and I can't seem to fit them in. Well, at least not when I'm frittering time on dumb things while freaking out over the bigger things. Duh, Anne.

The kids have gone back to school. My husband starts teaching today. And it's up to me to figure out how to spend this year learning how to FOCUS. One thing at a time. And not just time-wasting, mind-numbing things like Facebook or games.

I say all the time that I'm very task-oriented, and I am. So much so that I don't like to START a task that I can't FINISH at that time (or at least make reasonable progress on). Kids have inhibited that - I just have a hard time thinking I can start / get involved with some intense project, such as painting a room or writing or working on a photo album, etc, because I know I'll get interrupted and/or have to stop before I'm ready to in order to help the kids with something. That drives me nuts.

But in all honesty, I can't seem to focus on any task for more than 5 minutes. Is it my brain, so cluttered down with to-do's? Or is it my brain on modern technology, feeling as if I should check email or my phone or Facebook every 2 minutes? I certainly think that's part of it. Is it easier to get distracted now with all these electronic gadgets and the internet around? It is for me. Can one develop adult-onset ADD?

I'd like to stop beating myself up over all of this stuff, would like to unparalyze myself from inaction, and start DOING. In small steps. Baby steps. A little at a time. 15 minutes at a time. Whatever it takes. I've crafted a loose schedule for myself this fall, and I want to follow it: work out every week day (another area in which I feel like a complete failure, but that's another day's blog post), write, read/research. That's it.

I've been working on stuff for my kids' school this afternoon. I've been fairly productive, I think. But I've been telling myself the whole time, "You should be writing. You should be editing your book." Blah, blah blah.

So I took a few minutes and drafted this impulsive, not-so-well-written, stream-of-consciousness blog post.

And now I can cross writing off the list for today. I told myself I'd write something every day, even if "just a blog post." And I did. Take that, overactive anxiety-ridden, ueber-multi-tasking brain!

The Rest Is Yet Unwritten...

Wow, I suck at keeping a blog! Maybe it's because I've chosen no overall focus - unlike other bloggers, who focus on organizing or dieting or product reviews or the like, I've kept this one kind of, well, random.

Hopefully this fall that will change. Not because you all are dying to read everything I write, and not because I'm suddenly clear on what I want to do here. But because come this fall, I am going to dedicate at least 1.5 hours a day to writing. It can be on my books - the one I've already started, or other ideas in my head -, it can be on a non-fiction topic, it can be a blog post (or several). But it's going to happen. I'm excited! I'm nervous! I'm still lacking in focus here!

So perhaps we will see this blog evolve into a chronicling of my attempts to write a "real" book. Perhaps it will be musings on my children, or ramblings from my head on various topics (deep and incredibly shallow) that interest me. But it's gonna happen. You've been warned. Hee hee hee.

Rejecting Rejection.

"So what did you do at the party, Ellie?"
"We played wif da parachute, and climbed on da rock wall."
"Oh, was that fun? Were you good at the rock wall?"
"Yeah," she said, and then paused. "But all the kids said I was too heavy," she added.
My heart broke. Again.
But then she went on..."But I didn't cry or whine or do anything, I just did it anyway. I thought about turning around and saying 'Don't say that!', but I just ignored it and did it anyway."

YES! YES, my beautiful Ellie girl. Don't let them defeat you before you even begin. Don't let them tell you you can't do something just because of your size - whatever that size is. Try it anyway. And most of all, don't let their negative comments influence your own feelings about yourself. Way to go!

R-E-A-L-I-T-Y...Find Out What It Means to Me!

(This blog post is actually an e-mail response to a friend who had blogged about "consciousness" and wanted my response. Her original post is here.)


Thinking about "consciousness" is something I do often. Or sort of, in that what I often find myself ruminating on is what "reality" must feel like to other people. I mean, my husband is probably closer to me than any other person, and yet his life is so different from mine. He is so different from me. He has different thoughts, different expectations, different experiences, and yet we share more of our lives than I do with anyone else. It fascinates me to wonder what life feels like to my fundamentalist next-door neighbor. To the Islamic family across the street. To the elderly couple next door. To the alcoholic woman living nearby, struggling with her kids. These are all people right in my vicinity, but whose lives are vastly different from mine. 

Expand that. What's it like to be living right now in south central LA? In London, England? In China? In Africa? We're all living at the same time, in the same world, and yet our experiences of that world are so different at any given moment that it sometimes amazes me we have anything in common at all. And yet we do. When I read Facebook posts, I can relate to so much of what others say. Reading books, watching videos, experiencing all those forms of communication makes me realize we are so very different and yet not so different in terms of basic wants and needs, for the most part. I may be a flaming liberal and you (the general you) may be a conservative Republican, but I bet both of us want to be loved and cared about, etc. 

This is something that fascinates me. I'm not into philosophy. It feels beyond my reach. But I love to analyze in a pop psychology way. I may get my philosophers wrong from Western Civ recollections, but I believe it was Plato who postulated there were "ideals" beyond what we see - we see a million variety of cats, but there exists somewhere an "ideal" cat. I don't know if that's true, but what fascinates me is that for most of us, that "ideal" would be different, but yet would still kind of be the same. You may picture a certain kind of chair when you think of chair, I may think of another, but yet they are both chairs. Am I right and you wrong? 

So I often wonder if there is such a generic, general thing as reality, when reality is based so much in self. Our understanding of the world is colored, of course, by who we are. By the biochemical wiring of our brains, by our life experiences, by our values (learned or "innate"), by our expectations. I don't dabble in politics much, I don't care for the stress and anxiety it creates in that I don't think I'm going to change your mind, you're not going to change mine, so why argue? But thinking about how we all have our realities that necessarily conform to what we believe and feel to be true about the world helps me understand, somewhat, people who can be political or religious extremists. For them that IS what the world is. Extending that, however, to claim that EVERYONE must feel/experience the world in that way makes no sense to me. 

This is one of MY struggles with religion and politics. Just because *I* believe something to be true and valuable, does that mean I have the right to think YOU should believe it, too? Is it even realistic? I mean, I believe strongly in equal marriage rights whether one is gay or straight, but is it fair for me to demand everyone else believe that, too?

I know so much of my own religious and political views are influenced by my personality and how I relate to the world. I am an anxious person. I seem to have anxiety wired into my brain. Therefore I seek out things that make me feel safe. Is this "ideal"? Probably not. But it's what I do - and I think it explains, partly, why the idea of a protective government that provides social services and aims to care for the disenfranchised, the poor, the struggling, appeals so much to me. Because if I were in that situation I want to believe someone would help me, and not that I would be left to pull myself up by my bootstraps, so to speak. Perhaps if I were wired toward independence and self-reliance I would understand Republicans more. (Probably not. ;))

The same goes for religion. I was not raised in a religious household, my mom having decided for herself Christianity did not ring true. As a teenager, we started attending the Unitarian Universalist fellowship, in part because my mom felt she needed to provide some sort of spiritual education/outlet for her children, and partly because I think she needed one herself. I loved it and still do - but I became a Christian in 2004. I have dabbled in and danced with Christianity my whole life - WANTING to believe but knowing I couldn't just "say" I believed to "conform", I had to really believe, because doing otherwise would be a lie and disrespectful to practicing Christians. Do I know WHY I wanted to believe? I'm sure to a small degree to fit in better, but more than that, I craved the "safety", the feeling of being loved no matter what, the feeling that there was something else. Is this rational? No, probably not, in the strict sense of the world. But it fits with my anxious world view. Still, anxiety is not the only reason I sought something else out. It's looking for answers, it's wondering, it's reflecting on a tradition 2000 years old. But it was some personal experiences that cemented it for me, and those are in no way based in science or even logic. I'm O.K. with that. 

I'm smart enough to know if I'd been raised in an Islamic area I'd most likely be Islamic. Or Hindi. Or Jewish. So even though I call myself a Christian now, I agree that there's so much I don't know, and so much I feel none of us can know, that I don't make any claims that I'm right and anyone else is wrong. I'm living this life for ME, not for you. I'm open to all traditions and all faiths, and open to the idea that they could all be wrong. They could all be right. I don't know. But for my day-to-day sanity I find it more comforting to believe there is something out there. And I'm O.K. with that. 

Anyway, I do ruminate a lot on the idea of consciousness in terms of realizing that I will never truly know what life is like for anyone outside of myself, no matter how close or how removed from them I am. This fascinates me and freaks me out. I watch people turning the corner in cars when I sit at a stoplight and wonder where they're going, what they're thinking, what life is like for them, and these are just people in this town. I realize I will never really know what it's like to live as a black man, as a Latina woman, as part of the 1%, as a Jewish person. I will never know what it's like to be Chinese, to hail from Argentina, to be Russian. I will never know what it was like to live in the 1950's, the 1850's, the 1450's, the Roman Empire. This is partly why history fascinates me - and why I struggled with academe. Because as a historian, I was expected to speak authoritatively on what life in the past was like. But as we all know, history is written by the victors, or at least those with access to power to record, and not only that, but history is EDITED, as well. We can't possibly relate all the details about a time period even if we had them, because then we'd basically have to live the time period again. We necessarily edit history all the time. We write it, color it, interpret it, explain it, from our own perspectives. We CAN'T ever divorce ourselves from our own biases. This is what I struggled with in school, with my gender studies slant - what does that REALLY reveal about medieval history, beyond that that's what interests scholars RIGHT NOW in 21st century America?

Things can constantly be reinterpreted, changed, manipulated, edited, omitted. What does that mean for "reality"? I love historical information - but do I have to constantly worry about what is true? How do we really KNOW Charlemagne existed? Plato? Harriet Tubman? Are those people and their historical acts any more or less true than religious figures and experiences mentioned in religious texts?

We write about medieval history as if we really knew how they lived (I mention this period because it was my era of study), but we work from so few sources it's almost laughable. I'm amazed by how much we can know, sure, but also never forget how much we'll never know. It's like a never-ending jigsaw for which we have only a few pieces.

We read modern newspapers, magazine, even blog posts, and assume they tell us about our world, but I feel more and more the only world we ever really know is our own, the one we can immediately experience. You'd think that would make me better at living in the present, rather than worrying about the future or lamenting the past. It doesn't.

I kind of experience other people's realities through discussions with them, through day-to-day interactions, through reading, through Facebook posts. But I don't really know them and they don't really know me. By knowing I mean I don't really experience life as they do, and vice versa. I often look at Brett and wonder what it would be like to go through life with self-confidence, and having very little interest in other people. What would it be like to be male? What would it be like NOT to be anxious? And then I extend that to "What would it be like to be an extremist? Of a different race? Growing up under a different political system? In a different time period?" I love this question. Most people think I'm nuts, I think, when I talk about it.

The older I get, the more insular I get. I'm not sure this is good. But if the only reality I really have is mine, why not focus on it? If I can't escape the "I", I might as well embrace it.

But I still love the reminders that, even as I get caught up in ruminating on differences, amazingly there are many, many experiences that link we humans (and even animals) together.

Distracted

Distracted. I feel so distracted lately. I haven't even blogged in nearly 6 months.

Lost. I feel lost lately. Not really sure where my life is going. Not really sure of my position in the world.

I'm certain part of this is because of the Big Change this year. No, not menopause. I'm not quite there yet. But my kids both are in school full-time this year. I'm still at home. I want to be at home. We really need me at home, with the carpooling and vacation days and errands to run and sick children to care for and laundry to do, etc. But it means I'm at a bit of a loss. What is my value when I'm not with kids? Do I really have to spend all my time cleaning and keeping house? How much free time is it O.K. for me to have?

I settled part of that, the desire to make us a little (and I mean little) money and feel as if I'm contributing, by relaunching my eBay business, only this time I'm also selling for other people. And I have plenty to do. Enough to work at it full-time, at least right now since 5-6 people have given me lots to sell. Only I'm NOT getting to it full-time. I'm not even getting to it half-time. So now I have a second area of guilt: not only is the house not clean (because really, it's just not something I enjoy doing so I don't prioritize it), but I'm not getting my job done, either. I'm getting maybe 8 hours in a week most weeks, I'm guessing.

Where does the rest of the time go? I do still waste too much time on Facebook. I've discovered Pinterest. I'm still trying to make it to the gym (oh yeah: third point of guilt is my falling off the fitness wagon and being too lazy and unfit to jump back on). I do laundry. I run errands. I play too much Words With Friends. I hang with my husband. I putter and clean and bake. I do the newsletter and other small fundraising things for my kids' school.

I haven't gone out of town on fun day trips like I thought I would. I only occasionally go out to lunch with friends. I'm not lying around watching Oprah and eating bon bons. And yet I feel so behind in every way.

Is it just a case of poor time management? Maybe. Lack of focus? Probably. The struggle between doing what I WANT to do and doing what I NEED to do? Certainly.

How do other women do it?