Sticking to schedule

My week isn’t going as planned and I have not progressed with my goal of following my schedule. I took a sick day off work on Monday (I was perfectly fine to go to work) and I ended up with a migraine on Tuesday. Monday and Tuesdays are my planned gym days, so of course I skipped those. This means I’ve been to the gym exactly no times this week, when I wanted to go 3 times.

I’ve gone astray with my exercise routine and I keep making up excuses for why I can’t go to the gym when I’ve even penciled it in to my schedule. Sometimes I feel like there are two versions of myself competing for air time. One version is a self conscious, impulsive teenager who likes comfort, short term pleasure and constantly measures herself to others. She’s fun, highly emotional and a little reckless. The other version of me is an adult with goals, ambitions, discipline and the ability to detach from thoughts of not being good enough. My inner teenager, if you will, catches me off guard and I’ll end up self sabotaging my efforts for short term good feelings. The gym, after all, is not her ideal environment.

Perhaps this self sabotaging behavior comes from dismissing the inner teenager side to me in favor of the adult. What my inner teenager wants is fun, friends and a sense of belonging. What my adult self wants is a solid exercise regime. Unfortunately these events seem mutually exclusive at the present time in my life, I don’t have any friends at the gym and I find it quite lonely. Sure, if I go to the gym often enough I might make friends, but the future is not something my inner teenager thinks about.

I’ve got to work out how to appease both my inner teenager and my adult self in order to get what I want out of life. It’s clear that I won’t get friends and a sense of belonging from the gym just yet, and will need to look into other ways to bring more of this into my life. I do tend to say no to social events so that I can have more time to study or go to the gym or tidy up. This could be why I’m rebelling on myself, I have too many adult priorities and am shoving my teen side into the corner. Could spending more time with friends help me to achieve my goals?

I’m tempted to experiment with this idea next week and catch up with a friend mid-week, or even go out on a date night with Callum for my sense of fun. Will this help me stay on track with my schedule if I ensure I have enough activities that balance out my responsibilties too? I can only try and see what happens.

I’ve come up with a little table to see what I can balance my responsibilities with and will aim to incorporate both into my schedule.

Maybe if my schedule is less hostile towards my inner teenager, I’ll actually stick to it. I can only see if this helps me a little on my way to being the type of person who can follow a schedule.

Final Quarter 2020 goals

Other than a brief 4 weeks over June, we’ve been in a strict lockdown due to Corona Virus since March. Being an introvert, the lockdown hasn’t been too terrible for my mental health. I’m even in better mental shape than I was this time last year. Unfortunately, my physical health has waned in these six or so months. I currently feel the least healthy physically than I have since 2011.

I’m nearly at the highest weight I’ve ever been, I’m currently 77kg. That’s a 10kg weight gain in a year. I’m barely exercising, I’m binge eating each night and I’ve been drinking far too much alcohol. I’m sitting here on my laptop, feeling exhausted from too much coffee and then crashing, drained, unmotivated and feeling like a nap, even though I got up 2 hours ago and I’ve managed to achieve nothing so far.

I made some final quarter goals the other day to give myself something to work towards before 2021. My goals are centered around building positive habits in my life, rather than on focusing on numerical goals like a goal weight. The idea is, I want to walk into 2021 feeling my best and ready for a drastic life change. I want to have established habits that set me up well for my new life.

I’ve been a high school teacher for the past 5 years and at times I’ve been happy with this career choice. However, teaching consumed me and I didn’t like that about myself. In my first year, I meticulously planned my time and tried hard to maintain a work-life balance, but I never could maintain that balance as teaching sucked the energy right out of me. I didn’t have the energy to stick to my plans and I never feel like I was doing a good enough job in teaching either, eventually I burnt out. For the past two years, I have not enjoyed my job. Sure, there are moments of joy. Overall, I’m pretty dissatisfied with my career and I resent how much it takes out of me.

So I took action, I decided to change careers and next year I’m returning to full time study to become a biostatistician. This career move feels right. I realise how privileged and lucky I am to be in a position to take a year and a half out of work to change careers, I’m so grateful that I am able to do this and feel that I need to make the most out of this opportunity.

I want to be healthy in 2021 so that I can make the most out of my time away from work. I don’t want to wake up feeling sluggish and ill prepared. I want to be vibrant and full of energy to carry me through my masters degree. My final quarter goals for 2020 are all about building habits that will help me in 2021 and beyond.

My Final Quarter 2020 goals are:

1. Do some form of exercise each day. Even if I am tired, I can do stretching. Just some form of exercise each and every day to set up a routine of working out. I’m not concerned with timing or intensity, I want to first build the habit of consistency. When I go back to work, I’ll exercise as soon as I get home.
2. Study each day. I have a month left of my maths degree, I want to make sure I do the best I can to set myself up for my masters. Again, I’m just after consistency here.
3. Don’t diet or count calories. I’ve beaten myself up for too long about my weight gain and I have tried over and over this year to diet. I fail each time and I am done with dieting. This isn’t how I want to live my life, I want to make peace with food and focus on eating to feel good. I know how junk food makes me feel. I feel awful when I binge.
4. Read each day. Even if it’s a paragraph before I go to sleep, that’s still progress. Any progress is progress. I want to be a smarter, more knowledgeable person and reading is a great way to build on that.
5. Make sure I go to bed each night with a tidy house. I love clean environments, I love how lighter I feel when things are in their proper place and my house flows. Waking up to dishes frustrates me, this leads me to turning off my feelings and ignoring the mess I leave in the kitchen. This compounds, I end up feeling indifferent to my mess and live in filth for a while.

I will reflect on these goals regularly to stay on track to make sure I am building habits that I want to have with me in 2021, and for the rest of my life too. This year will not go to waste, It will be about building habits for the better times.

What I will leave behind in 2019

The end of each year is an excellent time to reflect on the trials and tribulations of the year, to learn from and process those experiences. It’s also a good time to highlight the positive aspects to the year and deliberate on how you can integrate more of those positive times into the coming year.

For me, this year has been one of the toughest years yet. I started the year by having an abortion, an unpleasant and heart wrenching experience.  The man who got me pregnant was a delusional narcissist who completely lied to me about who he was, his profession, his family, where he lived and how he earned his money. He lied to me, he manipulated me, he drugged me and, worst of all,  he turned myself against me.

This year, I’ve also been hospitalised because of my extreme mood swings, suicidality and impulsive behaviours. I’ve been diagnosed with an array of mood disorders, eating disorders, complex-ptsd and most recently, a final diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

I’ve lost friends and re-connected with old friends, I’ve spent months where I’ve been in a daydream, or nightmare rather, completely spaced out from the world, not feeling like the world is real. My work has suffered, my relationships with my family have suffered and I’ve put my studying, physical health and hobbies on hold.

What can I learn from all of this? What do I not want to bring with me through to 2020? What stands out to me most are the unhelpful coping mechanisms. I’m very quiet, perfectionistic and the last time I had a temper tantrum my age was probably in single digits. I’m not explosive and tempermental, a characteristic amongst those who have been diagnosed with BPD. I’m sweet, docile, but often off with the fairies.

Fittingly, my favourite coping mechanism by far is dissociation. Whether it’s extreme spaciness, where I don’t feel like I’m in the real world and can barely remember the experience, or simply dealing with the pain of life by going into a daydream. Dissociation works, it allows me the ultimate escape, but it’s no longer helpful. I’ve been doing it for most of my life but it’s time to put that aside and live in the present. Although scary, I am committed to practising mindfulness each and every day.

Impulsivity is an area where I’ve really made great strides in this year. I am almost clear of a $7k+ credit card debt that I wracked up in a very short space of time, I do not date to fill a void anymore and nothing makes you less risky with unsafe sex like an abortion. I sometimes struggle when I’m feeling down to not eat everything in my house and then throw it all back up, I also struggle to not get horrendously drunk If I’m feeling a little uncomfortable. However, these are areas I now recognise as problematic when this time last year, I was entirely oblivious to what these behaviours were masking.

The last coping mechanism I’d like to leave behind me will be very difficult, it’s how I’ve lived my life. Isolation. I feel most safe and comfortable when I’m alone. I crave being alone because I feel like I don’t fit in this world. When I’m at my worst, I feel suicidal around other people. When I’m at my best, I feel awkward. I know things will get better with time, I know with practise I will feel comfortable around people. I sometimes fantasize about having a group of friends and going out often, talking unreservedly about daily affairs and life’s comings and goings. I think, had I had developed healthier coping mechanisms for my sensitivity and dysregulation, I may have been quite the extrovert.

I don’t believe anybody should go cold turkey with a coping mechanism and not replace it. I replace dissociation with mindfulness practise, in times when I need to not be in this world, or where I’ve lost myself without control, I’ll be understanding and patient with myself. Blogging will help in this domain, tonight I’ve been fighting fantasy land and I decided to open my laptop and type instead. It’s worked, so go me.

Isolation is the biggest thing I’d to work on in 2020. I’d like to start by connecting with my dad.

If I won the lottery

If I won the lottery tomorrow I would:

Quit my job and study Mathematics at university
Buy a nice house close to the city
Get a personal trainer
Travel in the holidays

Chances are I’m not going to win the lottery, but my lottery list is attainable even without winning. Over the past year I have daydreamed about winning the lottery, possibly to escape the daily grind that I am not totally satisfied with. Don’t get me wrong, my job is rewarding and I do like going into work. I don’t like the long hours I do or the lack of social outings I get to attend. It seems my lottery list is really just a way for me to incorporate things into my life that I feel are missing.

Deep down, I’m yearning for adventure and learning, for fitness, for social connection. I’m not after things to fill my life, I’m after more experiences that better me as a human. Sure, the lottery will help with this. I can’t actually afford a personal trainer or to take lavish holidays. But I don’t need the lotto winnings to have the valuable experiences I’m after.

Without the aid of the lottery, I aim to have the most fulfilling life that I can. I have to start building better habits to get me there and taking great risks. You don’t grow in the comfort zone.

First things first, I really want to study mathematics. What motivates me is how little I understand it. As an adult, I finally appreciate how it explains the world around us, how we can predict things that haven’t happened yet! It will also help me in my current career so that’s a bonus too! After some research, I found an online Postgraduate Diploma of Mathematics that I have just submitted an application for. I’m thrilled! I’m doing this on my own, without winning the lottery.

I can’t keep thinking that there are obstacles in the way of me living the life I want too. There are hurdles, yes, but these can be overcome if you’re willing to put in the hard work.

Getting your shit together. Identifying the habits I wish to adopt.

Have you ever met a person who seems to have it all figured out? Not just the grand scheme of their life, but the every day mundane tasks too. Why can they manage to brush their teeth without spilling toothpaste all over themselves? Why do they have a sparkling clean house when they work twice as many hours as me? How do they have the energy to do chores straight away instead of leaving them for their future-selves?

In an attempt to emulate these super-people ways, I have spent many hours googling things like “How to have more energy”, “How to be cleaner” or “How to stop procrastinating and just do things”. Throughout my google trawls and life observances, I have come to realise that these super people I so desperately want to be, aren’t super people at all. They are, I daresay, ordinary people. What separates these people from myself is that these people have good habits. Habits are things you do without thinking about them. You have done them so many times before, and they are so familiar, that now you no longer need extra brain effort to do them. Eg. Brushing your teeth how you’ve always done it, so that you get toothpaste everywhere.

Super people, that is, people who are efficient, productive, creative, organised and generally have their shit together, have good habits. That’s what makes them so super. But how do I have good habits? Well, I think the first part of this is identifying which habits do I want to have.

Habits I want to adopt:

I want to automatically go for a walk after dinner. Not something arduous, just a leisurely turn about the neighbourhood after a meal. There are many benefits to this and yet each night after dinner I do the same thing, open up my laptop and start reading blogs or emails, I have yet to go for a short stroll.

I don’t want to snack. When faced with a plate of nibblies I want to automatically NOT snack on them. Currently, my hand knows what I want before I do and soon enough I’ll find chip and dips coming towards my mouth and there is nothing my brain can do to stop that hand of mine. I swear, the extra pudding I’m carrying lately is a result of my habits, not me.

I want to clean up after I’ve made a mess. I seem to leave it all until later, but later never comes. I had eight coffee mugs in my bedroom on Saturday. A weeks worth of coffee mugs all stacked up on my bedside table, awaiting someone to take them to the dishwasher.

I want to save money. A habit I think many of us want to adopt. Achieving an excellent savings rate of over 40% of my income can only be achieved through good spending and saving habits.

I want to be a better friend. Calling and checking in on the people I love is something I’ve neglected lately, but this is a habit. Catching up with people regularly can become effortless if I do it with some regularity and with a reward. The hermit inside me is screaming.

I want to put on body butter before I go to sleep.

Now what?

So I’ve identified some habits that I want to adopt, or stop, now I aim to incorporate these into my daily routine. First, I’ll focus on one or two things over the course of the week. Tonight I have already cleaned the laundry and put away my towel after my shower (I usually don the laundry floor with old, smelly clothes). I’m well on the way to becoming the clean freak I aspire to be. No more piles of coffee cups on my bedside table for me! Overtime I’ll report back on how I am going, have I managed to integrate these habits into my life? Or will it will become just another thing I want in my life, but never quite seem to have?

Time and experience will tell.

Formulating a dream

A dream of mine is starting to formulate in my mind, something different to the “I will be pretty, skinny and have a large house” kinda unproductive dream I like to muse from time to time.

No, I feel like this is a dream I can grab by the horns and throw myself into. Something I can commit to 100% that will challenge me and my lifestyle. It excites me, yet I feel too ashamed to admit it to any of my closest confidantes. It’s my little secret desire that’s just starting to ignite, will it persist and I will find myself chasing this? Or is it whimsical and fleeting? I don’t know.

As I have a tendency to be reckless and impulsive at times, I’m just going to think about my dream before I let it out into the open; that is until I declare that this is my dream and this is what I’m going to do.

So, what is this little dream of mine? As nerdy as this is, I want to go back to university and pursue a career in mathematics and/or physics. I may go back into teaching, or travel down the path of academia. I feel guilty because I just started my career as a teacher, I feel like I can’t go back to uni now! At the same time I still want to be a teacher, I just want need to learn about these areas more in depth. I am absolutely enamoured with the topics and am personally pursing them as side hobbies.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time outside of school to devote myself fully to learning about scalar and vector quantities. I also don’t have the experts on hand. I’m also fully aware of my own personal attributes and the likelihood that I will change my mind in a matter of months and no longer seek a higher nerd status.

I find myself utterly confused with myself. Do I just lack the confidence to pursue the hobby of an armchair physicist? Am I making excuses? Am I trying to find a way out of adulthood because I just want to be a perpetual student?

 

 

Choosing your life

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to shape my own reality. I want everyday to have something amazing to it, I want to enjoy my time here on this earth. So I simply chose to be happy. Something amazing then starting happening, I’ve become happier.

In a matter of a week, I feel myself shifting. I don’t feel such a huge, insurmountable pressure weighing down on me anymore. I feel lighter, I feel like I have more time and I just genuinely feel like there’s more to life than before.

Now I have to admit I don’t find myself feeling blissful 100% of the time, last Friday I found myself in tears after a class went awry during the fourth period. But I didn’t ruminate on it all weekend like I usually do, instead I chose to forget about it on the weekend. I had fun.

Choosing happiness has got me thinking about other choices you can make in your life. I was speaking to my mother over the weekend who is almost financially ready to retire and move down to the beach. My mother is 54, has always earned a low income wage and she solely supported myself and my sister for our first 18 odd years of life. She used to cry over money often and we could never afford nice things growing up. Now, she’s a year away from financial freedom and I couldn’t help but wonder how she’s managed to retire 10 years earlier than normal without being a frugal weirdo. My mother simply told me that she always wanted to retire early. She said that in life, she’s always got what she asked for, eventually.

Hearing this statement was powerful. What do you mean ‘ask for’? My mother is by no means a religious women, so I don’t envision her kneeling down to the gods and praying for financial freedom, rather, she believed herself capable of this happening to her, and she made choices to enact it. To me it sounds like luck, to my mother, this was all her doing. Her bad decisions amounted to being in the right place at the right time, she took meaning from moments and learnt from her mistakes and successes.

Perhaps lucky people aren’t so lucky at all, they just choose to be bold enough to chase their dreams and desires. These lucky people get what the want because they choose to do what they want with their time. My mother made choices that led her down the path of retiring early.

My lesson that I learnt from my mother is that we all have choices, so we can put these choices to good use and choose the life that we want. I’m choosing a fulfilling life; a life full of love, laughter, compassion and freedom. I’m choosing that these permeate my everyday being to make me feel blissful and at peace.

I truly believe that If I choose to live the life I want, not the life I should, then I will get what I want. Eventually, just like my mother.

 

 

My aims for next semester

This time next week I’ll be back in full swing at school. Now that the holidays are coming to a close I find that I’m not dreading school so much. In fact, I’m almost excited to see my babies again. Albeit, nervous about what’s to come this semester.

Having successfully completed my first semester as a teacher, this semester is supposed to be somewhat easier, although still being hard as I am new to this. I’m doubtful as to whether or not this will be easier, but I endeavour to not lose myself so much this time around. I’m going to focus on being me, I’m a better teacher when I’m me. When I’m happy and have the energy to act my way through a class seamlessly.

Some things I’m going to try out this semester include:

1. Not taking work home with me. Of course, there are exceptions. I will have to mark on weekends and perhaps do some VIT teacher registration work. For the most part, no work at home. Mostly because I hate doing work at home. I hate being robbed of my Saturdays. I hate how little I get done when I am at home. It also doesn’t allow me a break to be me, when I’m working at home I’m still in a teacher mindset. Teacher mindset is exhausting and my boyfriend doesn’t appreciate it when I reprimand him for not using his inside voice while watching the footy.
2. Using the most of my commute. I have two hours worth of easy driving along a straight freeway each day. Usually, I use this time to stress about my job. No more of that nonsense! I can stress about my job, when I’m doing my job. This time could be better spent listening to ebooks or podcasts. I could also practise mindfulness or positive thinking.
3. Making the most of my weeknights. To me, weeknights are a wasted 4 hours after school where I watch TV, eat dinner and get ready for the next day. They feel meaningless to me. I do need time to unwind, but maybe I could go about this in a different manner. Maybe I could try and squeeze something else in those 4 hours that would make me happy. Each day, I’m going to do something in those 4 hours that make me a happier person. Whether it’s calling a friend, sticking to my exercise regime, pursuing a hobby, writing, drawing, reading, cooking, painting my nails or cleaning (I like cleaning, it relaxes me). I will do something that fulfils me each and every weekend.
4. Making new friends/re-connecting with old ones. I do feel isolated at the moment, with the most significant character in my life being my cat. I have neglected friends and passed up opportunities to make new ones. This semester, I will see friends more often. I will ask more people to hang out so that I can make new friends too.
5. Focus on the now, not the future.  I love my job, but it seems I also love to worry. I worry so much that I end up with an overwhelming sense of dread and poisonous thoughts like “I can’t do this, I cannot possibly do this”. Then I spend all weekend stressed, overworking but hardly working, cranky, run down and purchasing lottery tickets as an escape. I need to focus on what’s happening in my life right now. Right this second when nothing particularly bad is happening.
6. Being more productive. My input vs output is way out at the moment. From the outset, It appears I have been in my room all day “working”, what I’ve actually done is about 10 minutes of lesson planning and a whole lot of nonsense. From now on, the moment I step out of my car from the moment I step back into it, is working time. Productively working time. I’m at work, so I might as well work, right? Why do I slack off when that means I have to bring work home with me? I need to use my time wisely and effectively when I’m at school.

I’m sure I have plenty more ambitious aims to write down for this semester, but I should really just focus on those 6. I feel that they are important for me to focus on the most because they are centred around me as a person, not as a teacher. Last semester, my aims were all about being a creative, supportive teacher. I can only be that kind of teacher, and enjoy it, when I’ve looked after myself first. For me, the biggest gift I can give myself is time. Time for being myself again.

 

My dream work-day

This year is half over and I feel like I didn’t even notice where it went. What happened between January and now?

I’ve got a week left of my holidays, I still feel stressed. I’m snapping at my boyfriend all the time and I’m just grumpy. Why? My job is stressful and I need to do something about the insurmountable pressure that I feel to perform. My holiday checklist has not received any checks off it yet, I’ve got a lot to do in a week. Everything is coming back to my job and how it is consuming my life.

I need more in my everyday. More than school. School can be wonderful, and I have left school before thinking “WOW this is the best job in the world and I can’t imagine any other job like this”. But I come home and then it’s watching TV time and sleep. What if there was something else I could do?

My dream school day (which makes up the bulk of my life and therefore I should be concentrating on nailing a solid routine with maximum productivity) looks like this:

7:30-8:30: 
Planning tomorrow’s lessons and creating resources
Free periods:
Creating unit plans/finding resources/dealing with stuff I have to do/marking/VIT registration.
After school:
1 hour of prep for the week ahead/meetings/calling parents/VIT registration

Friday nights: Planning Mondays.

My goal is to be as productive as possible during my 7:30-5 workday. I WANT TO LEAVE AT 5! This gives me a nice 4 hours once I get home to do whatever I want.

Whatever I want. This is my problem. How do I tackle that? I feel unfulfilled in my life and this time it is my home life that is letting me down. My relationship is great, it’s me thats the issue here. I don’t know what to do on weekends and for my 4 hours.

Well, I like writing so I can blog. I like reading so I can read. I miss being muscley so I can workout, I just don’t know what else I can do because I am still feeling like somethings missing.

I am on a quest to make the most out of my days. I don’t enjoy being a grumpy stress ball.

Setting goals

Each year is the same. I set some resolutions and I fail to make said resolutions. I want to do something a little bit different this year. Instead of setting resolutions, I want to provide myself with some inspiration for the type of person I want to be. It’s interesting how we all evolve over time, and how we actually have a choice in the directions that life takes us.

So, over the course of the next few days, I really want to think about the type of person I want to become. I believe you can do anything you set your heart to and people can, and do, change. I believe that, to some extent, we can choose who we are.

A few years ago a close friend of mine and I sat down together over pancakes and wrote a list called “Ultimate me”. We wrote out the characteristics and habits we wanted to adopt. It worked! I remember vividly writing “I want to be the person who brushes their teeth twice a day, I want to make my bed every-morning”.

For the most part, I set out to become the person I wanted to. Looking back and reflecting on our little experiment, I can say that it did work. I do make my bed in the morning now and I brush my teeth twice a day, I floss too!

I felt like sitting down and writing a list of who I’d like to be provided my with some direction. It gave me a drive to get things done. In the end, I am not rewarded with, say, a thinner body or more money in my account. I never even really achieved that list because, like us, it is continually evolving.

This new years, I want to identify again who I’d like to be, what I’d like to be spending my time doing, and then working towards that.