my phone never has any available storage anymore it’s kind of unfortunate but also not at all
This is just way too painfully accurate.

#extradirty
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@itumblthingsnow
my phone never has any available storage anymore it’s kind of unfortunate but also not at all
This is just way too painfully accurate.
On anxiety and productivity
Hi tumblr! it’s been *mumble* years since I started this thing, with the intention of scratching my writing itch and possibly not being a creepy Anon when I send Asks to other tumblr users who are better at this than I am. (tumblr-ers? tumblrites? tumblrumbles?)
Alas, the path of an anxious, depressed grad student is paved with unfulfilled intentions. As proof, here’s a list of some of the things I’ve intended to do and not done in the past three years:
Now, a person who did even a fraction of those things would be leading a fairly successful and interesting life, right? On my most optimistic of days, I can imagine myself as that successful, interesting person. “Oh yes,” I imagine future-me saying as she tosses her immaculately-kept locks. “I recall the time when I didn’t maintain a full social schedule while also pursuing multiple fulfilling hobbies and meeting all of my academic deadlines and personal responsibilities. What a mess I was!” And then future-me laughs and takes a sip of a green smoothie and continues, I don’t know, stand-up-paddleboarding with her close-knit group of like-minded friends. Or something.
For a long time I’ve known that my problem with every single item on that list is time management. That ideal future-me has time to do ALL THE THINGS because she doesn’t spend 90 minutes or so on the couch every morning falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes while trying to figure out the optimal order in which to complete the day’s tasks. If only I would stop “wasting time doing nothing,” I’d think, I could do all of those things.
But see, I think I’ve finally figured out why I’ve never converted that awareness into actual change. I’m not “doing nothing” -- I’m trying to fight against anxiety. Anxiety is unpleasant and exhausting, but it’s also REALLY freaking time consuming. I’ve never lived in a normal person’s brain, so I can’t say for sure whether this is true, but I imagine that they look something like this when they’re making a minor decision about a day’s activities:
Meanwhile, this happened in my brain last Friday:
Do you see what I mean? A decision that would take your average Joe at MOST twenty seconds turns into a couple hours of internet research and strategizing. On a good day I still have time to actually implement the decision I’ve made; on a bad day, I give up before I ever come to a decision and watch Once Upon a Time on Netflix instead.
I’ve tried to eliminate the whole decision-making process by making myself schedules to follow, but the problem therein is I just end up frontloading all of the decisions into a single anxiety-filled session of over-analysis from which I take days to recover. Usually the schedule doesn’t even end up getting finished because I’ve worked myself into a panic over whether it makes sense to shop for groceries before or after I go to the gym on Tuesday.
So, the way I see it, I have two choices: I can start listing “anxiety” as one of my hobbies and just lean in, maybe start documenting my crazy-ass thought spirals the way other people photograph particularly elaborate meals they’ve made; or I can figure out how to keep my anxious thought patterns from turning “What should I cook for dinner?” into a question that requires a spreadsheet and a few hours of uninterrupted concentration. Maybe I could start flipping a coin to make decisions? That always turns out well, right?
Let's talk about TFIOS (and being An Adult)
So I'm not gonna lie, being a teenager kind of sucked for me. Not, like, Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" all-of-the-deck-is-stacked-against-me suck, of course, but enough Tobey-Maguire-as-awkward-Peter-Parker-type suck that I kind of really don't miss it at all.
That being said, I'm able to look back now and see some things that were kind of cool about being a teenager. It's hard to read my old LiveJournal or look at my Myspace (I know, I'm ancient, let's move on) because it's so... *holy melodrama batman!*, but it's kind of comforting to think back to when emotions were so raw, so clear, and felt so... unique to me. There's something to be said about being convinced nobody else has ever felt the way you feel.
So I think that's why it's hitting me kind of hard that I am so completely unenthusiastic about The Fault in Our Stars. It's a nice story, certainly. I feel like John Green handled some parts of it incredibly well (the grenade metaphor, for instance). But it didn't make me weep, and in the end, I wasn't all that deeply impressed. It felt... juvenile, like a child's fantasy of what love might be like - romantic dinners with champagne that tastes like stars and kisses in the Anne Frank house applauded by strangers and beautifully poignant eulogies delivered to the person's face. I remember thinking that love was those big, romantic, heavy, heady moments, that my life would be like Moulin Rouge and Titanic and Romeo+Juliet, a pressure cooker of love and loss.
But even when I look back on what love was like as a teenager, it wasn't the big romantic stuff that made it special. It wasn't pretty words and fancy dresses and beautiful soundtracks - not the dances and dinners and Valentine's days. It was hanging out with my boyfriend and friends on a random Tuesday evening, playing Wii bowling and planning our lives as wonderfully successful [insert-careers-we-didn't-end-up-having]s. It was getting a love note on social media on a day when I felt particularly awful about myself. It was the stolen moments away from our parents where our hearts raced and our faces flushed and we felt briefly what freedom might be like. It was kissing for like, an hour and a half because kissing was fun.
I think that's why I didn't have the magical it-reminded-me-how-being-a-teen-was response to TFIOS that everybody else seemed to. The book didn't describe me as a teen any more than it describes me now. But it makes me worry that maybe I'm losing a little bit of that hopelessly romantic, Moulin-Rouge-obsessed me who dreamed big and felt deeply. That even though I still find that a lot of YA fiction resonates with me (John Green's first novel, Looking for Alaska, is a current favorite) this is a sign that I'm turning into the kind of adult I used to hate -- the practical, grounded, non-creative type who has forgotten what it feels like to be 16.
I hope not, because while I certainly don't wish to go back, I can look back on 16-year-old me and like her, even if she doesn't really like herself.
So I've been thinking a lot about hobbies lately
Seems like most people in their mid 20s fall into a few categories when you ask them about themselves outside of work:
There's this guy
... He basically makes the rest of us feel really shitty about ourselves in the process of being a superhuman. Then there's this guy:
He hasn't quite figured out how to deal with the fact that he's no longer in college and his 9-5 job leaves him a good 7 hours of time in the evening to do something with. He's most likely in transition and is likely to turn into one of the other two guys.
Speaking of which, finally there's this guy:
He's so caught up with school or his job that he's completely ignoring everything else. He's the guy who got dragged to the party and will spend it checking his smartphone for work emails.
Basically our three friends up there illustrate one of the most difficult parts of this whole "adulting" nonsense, which is that whole "work-life balance" thing you hear so much about.
If Guys #1 and #3 up there are on opposite ends of the spectrum, Guy #2 has opted out entirely. But it seems like he's the majority among people I know, myself included -- despite all that crap everybody told us about "finding ourselves" in college, a couple years down the line we've realized that we have no idea what the hell we like to do other than take naps.
So what's the answer here? I don't think most of us want to be Guy #1, and I know that even Guy #3 doesn't want to be Guy #3. But without all the clubs and sports teams that were available to us in high school, the opportunities we have to be casually involved in something are slim -- it seems like everything's sort of an all-or-nothing proposition at this point. Either you're great at it, or you shouldn't bother. It's a hard line to walk.
I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. Maybe after I've finished binge-watching Lie to Me on Netflix.
Take two on this whole tumblr thing. It's like LiveJournal with .gifs right?
... When the hell did I get old?