Not only do I make to do lists for each day, I make lists for EVERYTHING. I write down what TV shows and albums and songs I need/want (delete as applicable) to download/buy (delete as applicable). When I'm feeling healthy I write down what meals I'm having for the week ahead so that I don't end up eating cheese sandwiches for lunch and pasta and sauce and cheese for tea seven days in a row (I love cheese but even for me, on the seventh day of insane cheese marathons like that, I get a little tired of it). I make lists for food shopping, clothes shopping, and odds'n'sods shopping. You get the general idea yeah? As tragic as it sounds, list-making is just an integral part of who I am.
However, last night I surprised even myself. I literally made the mother of all lists. All my list training finally came into play and I really pulled out the stops to go all in for Team Sazz (the membership of which amounts to one) and planned the next year or so of my life. It was liberating and scary and made me feel a million times better. See, since I relinquished my student status I haven't really thought about these things. I've done everything within my power to make schemes that allow me to put off thinking about these things, drinking wine and smoking weed and applying to do masters degrees. You know, the usual. Now I've been kicked into gear thanks to an evening in a beer garden in Old Portsmouth. An evening where I was stone-cold sober and the other two were drunk and I wasn't even the focus of the conversation (imagine!). What I wanted to do by the end of that evening was run away very far and very fast - not because of the company I was in you understand, more because we'd spent hours discussing what life is, what relationships mean, and what you would do if you could do anything in that moment. For reasons unclear to me, my overwhelming urge was to go get a bag of mushrooms and a bag of weed and find a hotel that screamed 'faded glamour' and stay up all night getting high.
But I didn't do that. I went home to bed and took off my make up and let the black dog onto my bed so she could curl into my legs and make those funny dream noises that dogs make all the while wondering to myself .. why didn't I run away and go and do something stupid and impetuous just for the fun of it? Why do I never take the least sensible option? You should be cultivating a drug addiction and living in some squalid squat and falling in love with traveling poets. That's the sort of thing people who live life with abandon do, that's the sort of thing the characters in the books you love do, why can't you be the sort of person that moves to Tijuana carrying nothing but a sketchpad and a hammock just for the sake of it?
Then, paradoxically, considering I had just spent an hour beating myself up for always being too cautious I found I had a heavy pain in my chest and an overwhelming sense of regret... why did you buy that ridiculous, impractical, difficult to drive car? It may look cool but you're never going to be certain of it starting in the mornings [you can't overestimate how much serenity you get from that knowledge]. I was so happy when I bought it not less than 10 hours before. Now I felt trapped by it... I have no money. I have no job. I can't afford petrol to put in a car let alone a car itself... what the fuck are you doing with yourself?
Times like these I need order and control.
This is where the lists come in.
Which is when I started thinking about the sort of life I want to live and who I want to be and how I'm going to achieve all that. And I mean really thinking about it. Somewhere between exams finishing and moving back home I forgot all the things that I wanted to do. Well, less forgot and more ignored. It's too exhausting following your dreams. There are too many things that can go wrong. Plus, if you decide on a certain path then you feel obligated to tell people these dreams whenever they may inquire as to what it is you intend to do to stop wasting you look like a cunt. Again. (Trust me, having changed my mind approximately 17 times in the last six months about how I'm spending the next year, I know this feeling oh-so well).
Anyway. 'The List'. I'm feeling pretty confident about it. Once I've made my mind up about something I have a tendency to just get on with it (c.f: job, car, degree). It just has to be something I really really want to happen (rather than something I'm convincing myself I want to happen) and I just have to make sure I don't end up procrastinating or getting paralysed with fear that I'll never be able to get on and tick all those boxes.
I really don't hate you enough to intimately detail 'The List's' contents but I will, however, tell you this much...
- It is a full two-year plan sub-divided by:
- ultimate aims
- monthly goals
- daily 'to do's'
- It requires three different A5 notebooks all of which tackle a different area of the 'Improving Sazz Plan'.
- Finally, the whole spirit of 'The List' enterprise is primarily very simple: Stop being a dick. (There's no tick box for this particular goal but that's what was motivating me at the back of my mind. 'Just, seriously, don't be such a dick to people anymore. It doesn't help anyone least of all yourself.')
How did I react?
I became a dick. I found it physically impossible to make idle chit-chat with my new colleagues. Yesterday I was actually doing all right at it. Me! The person who has a deep seated fear of chatting rubbish with people I have nothing in common with! I spoke and I laughed and I was, you know, kind of an okay person.
Turns out I have have enough energy to do that for 7 hours, no more, no less (well, probably less). But I'm going to try 'not being a dick' again tomorrow. It feels nicer to be someone that's accepted by a group instead of the 'weird girl'. I should have learned that by now and yet I keep needing to get reminders. Such is the curse of the person who lives their life being a dick.
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