aaarggh

[grinninfoole]

I had today off from work, and M spent it off with friends, and I find myself, at the end of it, upset with myself.  It's not that I didn't do anything useful or fun with myself today.  No, I went to pilates, got a nice hair cut, went for a walk, watched a Dr. Who episode, and got some shopping done. 

What bugs me is threefold: I didn't do anything about getting a new job, or spend any time writing.  I didn't connect with friends, even though I could have, had I just pulled my cranium from my sphincter.  And, while it felt satisfying in itself, I wound up spending more than an hour at the store anyway.  (I stopped by to retrieve a dropped glove, and stayed fiddling with things, calling UPS to see if they fix their screw up of not delivering today's shipment, and then writing up this post.)

I hate myself when I futz around like this.  I'm very conscious that I'm getting older every day, that I'm letting the only life I'll ever have slip away stupidly, and that if I don't want to look back and regret my 30s the way I regret my 20s, I have to fucking change things.   And it makes me angry at myself, which makes me sullen and withdrawn, which is no fun for poor millari.

Which is a pity, because living with her continues to be the one life choice with which I am satisfied on a daily basis.

Comments

[millari.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you wrote this out. I think it improved your immediate mood a bit for having done it.

I'm sorry you're feeling this way. I know that feeling of having a day off when there's not enough inherent structure already planned into the day: It can be very easy to slip into doing nothing in particular. Sometimes, this is necessary: Sometimes it means you've been working hard for several days in a row and you need to recharge your batteries by vegging out, doing not very much. Also, I find that working at a job where you have to be "on" for people all day sometimes means that when you recharge, you need to *not* be around people. Maybe this is what happened yesterday and that is why you did not connect with friends. Maybe not. But honestly, I bet if I'd brought you along with me to Vermont, you would have fallen asleep at some point, and I think that would have been about you being tired yes, but also about you needing the isolation.

Sometimes you have to use your day off for that, and you don't get to feel like it was the most productive day ever. But it was still necessary to use it for that. So you move on and plan for the next day off.

Might I suggest maybe planning ahead the night before for your days off? Or is executing, not planning the problem? I get the impression that it's easy for you to wake up in the morning and get paralyzed about what to do with your day unless you have the structure of work or other already-set plans. Maybe you'd be less susceptible to paralysis if you were figuring out what you were going to do with your day the night before. Or the day before. I think when you wake up in the morning and try to decide, the stakes are a lot higher and it's more paralyzing, because they day seems totally open to anything, and it makes it very hard for you to settle on a few things; you have this tendency to hate settling on one thing because it means in your mind that you have to reject another choice. I think trying to settle on something in the moment like that is setting yourself up for angst, indecision and paralysis.

I suggest planning out your day the day before, and maybe even writing the plan down, so when you wake up in the morning, it's already all set and you don't have to make decisions.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's so crazy, it just might work.