Saturday, February 8, 2014

Happy Mediums

Sometime in my younger years I decided that life was about happy mediums or what I sometimes call maintenance.

I have known for quite some time that I am not good with this concept.  I don't know why it is so hard for me to maintain. I sometimes wish I could live in a world were things like that were easier for me or came more naturally to me.  

Let me give you some examples.   It's easier to clean a few dishes every day then to not clean a single dish for 2 weeks and then have to hunker down and spend 2 hours washing dishes and trying to get rid of all of the grossness that had started to grow in your kitchen sink.  (Not that I have ever done that.  haha)  While it is nice to not have to do dishes for those 2 weeks, was it worth it to have a messy kitchen the whole time and have to do all that cleaning?

Or, it would be easier to maintain a healthy lifestyle of good eating and regular exercise than to realize you are 30 lbs overweight, can't fit into a dress you have to wear in a month, and have to go on some crash diet of 500 cal/day and 3 hour workouts/day until you are where you want to be again.

This past November I participated in the NaNoWriMo, like I did the year before.  This time I started on time.  I was feeling good.  I was a little ahead of schedule, and then...I did what I always seem to do.  I started to lose momentum and things started to fall apart.  I told myself that it was okay and that I could make it up.  That "I have time." Unfortunately that never really happened.  Eventually I quit the NaNo.  I was frustrated with my story and it's progress and I sold into the idea that I was just too busy and it was okay to quit.

I watched as my friends who were doing the NaNo progress along happily.  I was jealous.  I wanted to be happily moving at a maintainable pace.  I looked at my progress and realized that if was going to finish I would have a lot of ground to make up.

Apparently this is where I thrive in life.  I am a procrastinator at heart who usually starts off well, stalls in the middle, and then pulls things out in the last minute.  That usually also includes a large amount of time and stress, all which could have been avoided if I had just kept moving the whole time.

These are my stats from this past NaNo.  See there in the middle where I struggled?  This graph is sort of like a picture of my life (which is utterly depressing).  You could look at it two different ways.

One: That I waste a lot of time being a procrastinator and making up for lost time.  That procrastinating is stupid and unnecessary and well rounded individuals don't live their lives this way.

Or two:  I always finish.  Good, bad, exhausted, and/or stressed...it gets done, and there is something be said for finishing.

I live somewhere in the middle of these two ideas.

For example:
I wish that my apartment wasn't in a constant state of either chaos or "don't touch anything, it is finally clean."

I wish I could just learn how to eat decent and work out a few times a week as a lifestyle and not be on either extreme of a) not caring what I eat and not working out, or b)spending 10 hours a week working out and feeling like I could kill someone because being overly hungry makes me angry and hateful.

I wish that being bored didn't make me lazy and being busy didn't make me stressed.

Some of you are thinking, just suck it up.  Get over it being hard and figure it out.  Or the cliche I live by all too often, Fake it til you make it.  That is good advise.  I guess I just haven't mastered it yet.

Is there a point in life where we are suppose to have it all together?  Like an age where we will have arrived? Have I already passed that age yet?  Am I desperately behind?  I don't know.  Don't tell me if I am.

I don't really have a solution to this "problem" of mine.  Your thoughts and advice are welcome.

Oh and just so you know, I did finish the NaNo (as pictured above) just like I always do.  I am proud of myself for finishing but it does leave a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth when thinking about doing it again this year.

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