Tag productivity

Losing Spoons

Dusty 6 Comments

Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly. See, writing a blog, even a short one about happy things, costs me some number of productivity spoons; and I find that I have fewer productivity spoons left to me these days.

(By the way: if you’re not aware of spoon theory, here’s a visual. Read more here.)

This has been a shift for me, because I don’t normally run out of spoons. Well, I do, but I have a lot to spend, most days. I spend a lot of them at work, but I can still usually do a few things in the evening; I can go to the gym; I can go to the grocery store and make dinner; I can sometimes do a task for school, like set up a lesson for the next day. I can almost always get something written even on a school night, if it’s not one of the times in the school year when I’m burnt and exhausted and hate everything. And on the weekends, I can usually spend the entire time working, on grading, or chores, or my writing.

Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have a chronic disease or the weight of mental health concerns.

But my usual easy productivity has not been with me for the last month. Now I have to count my spoons.

It’s remarkable, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I really thought I would be able to do extra things: I thought I would be able to get extra writing done, since I don’t have to spend as much time at work; I thought I would be able to provide extra emotional support to my friends and family — and my students. The first week or two I was throwing around offers to help in any way I could; I suppose I’m lucky that nobody really took me up on it, because if I had had to spend my energy doing extra tasks for others, I’m not sure what I would have had to drop. I was angry with myself for the first couple of weeks: why was I so tired? And if I was so tired, why wasn’t I sleeping? Why wasn’t I getting more things done?

It didn’t really dawn on me at first that the answers were in some of the questions, and all I had to do was put the pieces together: I am tired because I’m not sleeping, and because everything I do — everything — is harder. I’m not sleeping for the same reason that everything is harder: because I am constantly afraid, constantly anxious, constantly trying to find something to do to solve the problem — and constantly aware that I cannot solve this problem. And of course, the more I worry, the less I sleep, and then I have less energy to do things, including worry, but worrying is never the thing I let go of in order to do other stuff: I worry first, and then whatever energy I have left over goes to my job and my daily tasks. I spend more energy getting mad at myself for not getting more done during the day, and because I’m tired and on edge, and I struggle with my temper, I am constantly getting mad at anything and everything around me. And then I feel bad because my family has to walk on eggshells around me so that I don’t snap at them. And there’s some more energy spent, and even less accomplished.

I get it now, I understand; I’m still not dealing with it well, though. I still get angry with myself for not doing more. It’s weird: somehow I still feel pressure to use this extra free time before it runs out, like I find myself thinking that I should do more writing or record more podcasts before the quarantine is over and I have to start going out and doing things more. Like this is a vacation.

But that’s not what this is. This is a natural disaster.

I’ve been through a few of those: a hurricane and more than one blizzard in Massachusetts; a wildfire in California; a flood in Oregon. None of them on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or Maria, or the Loma Prieta or Northridge earthquakes. But they were bad enough to show me what a natural disaster feels like: you watch things fall apart that you had always counted on; you watch danger arise from a direction and in a way that you never expected; you watch that danger come for you, or for those you love: and there’s nothing you can do. Except realize what you are about to lose. And realize you have no idea what to do if and when you lose it, how you will get it back, how you will live without it.

That’s what this is. Covid-19 has taken away things we never expected to lose, and we are in danger of losing even more, if we haven’t already lost everything. And I am aware of how lucky I am to be able to say that I have not lost everything. I see people on social media who have, and I can’t — no, I was going to say I can’t imagine what that would feel like; but I can imagine. That’s a lot of what I do during the day. I imagine what I could lose, and how it would feel, and what I would do about it. And every time I think about, what if I lose someone I love, or what if I lose my job and my home, I realize: there’s nothing I could do about it. I assume I’d adapt and survive, I assume I’d be able to ask for and receive some help; but I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I couldn’t fix the problem, couldn’t recover the loss. I know I’d be devastated. I don’t know how I’d deal with it. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to. I worry about all of it.

That’s why I can’t get much writing done. Not even happy little blogs: because it turns out that I need to feel happy before I can post happy things; or at least, I need to be close enough to happy to recognize what would be a good happy thing to post. I can write things that  I’m not actually feeling in the moment, but when I try to think up a good topic, or when I try to pick a good link to share, if I’m feeling down or exhausted or angry or afraid, nothing seems like a good idea. Which I also get mad at myself for, by the way. So that’s fun.

This is what it feels like to have to count your spoons. To have a chronic illness, or a mental health condition like anxiety or depression. It feels like nothing works right. And I suspect that you always feel like it’s your fault, like if you could only deal with it better, be smarter, more thoughtful and aware and organized, then everything would be better. Though maybe people who deal with this all the time are smarter about it than I am, maybe they know that they can’t blame themselves for something that’s outside of their control. All I know is that that thought doesn’t help me. Knowing that I can’t do anything about it doesn’t keep me from worrying about it. About anything. Knowing that it’s not my fault doesn’t keep me from getting angry at myself.

I even have that little annoying thing that clearly isn’t the main issue, but keeps popping up and irritating me, because it’s kind of a pain and it’s clearly connected to the larger problems, so when the little irritation pops into my consciousness, it makes me think of the bigger issues, which sets me on edge; at the same time, I can’t believe I also have to deal with that little fucking thing that just won’t go away. I have eczema, you see. On my hands. They itch. And then the skin dries out, and splits, and hurts. And itches more. It’s made worse by repeated hand washing, and by stress, so. Fucking annoying. I feel bad bitching about it, because people are dealing with things that are a thousand times worse, but that only makes it more irritating, because goddammit, my hands itch, and maybe I should be Zen enough to rise above it, but I can’t, and I feel lame and I wish I could just make it stop but I can’t control anything but I can still worry about it.

And around and around we go. Using up our spoons. And getting nothing done.

This wasn’t even the blog I was going to write; I was going to write about my students. And part of me thinks I should add that right here, right now, make the point I was actually going to make; but you know what? I don’t want to spend the spoons. I need to call my dad, and I want to maybe record a chapter of the book I’m reading to my students for their distance learning English class. So I think I will stop here, and write about my students tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

I’m grateful, honestly, that I’ve had this experience, because I think I get it now, what it is like to have to count your spoons. I’ve been able to sympathize with the people I know who have to do it, but I could never empathize. Now I think I can. But I also realize: if this disaster, and the weight of the worry that I’ve been carrying around for a month now, have reduced my formerly unlimited number of spoons to some number I have to count: what has it done to people who had to count their spoons in the first place?

And the scariest thing of all is: what if this doesn’t stop? I mean, that’s what it’s like to have a chronic illness: you have to recognize that the situation will, or at least may, be permanent. You’ll always have to count your spoons, forever. I  won’t have to face that, at least not with the current pandemic; it may take a year for things to get back to normal-ish, but there will be a vaccine, and things will improve; I don’t know how long the economic damage will last, but I know it won’t be forever. But for some people, the changes  wrought by this disaster will be permanent. And maybe they will be for me, too. Or if that doesn’t happen with this disaster, maybe it will happen with a future one. At some point, I will have to face and deal with a permanent loss, a reduction in my capacities and abilities, a change in my life, that will never get better. And then another one, and then another one.

I think, between now and then, and using what I have learned and what I am going through now, I have to learn to accept that loss, that reduction, that change, and keep going forward with what I have left to me. I’m sure I can do it; I know everybody does. We deal with loss for as long as we live. I hope I am learning how. I hope the learning helps.

What Should Be Saved

Dusty Leave a comment

I’ve seen this piece making the rounds today. It is worth reading.

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

After reading this, I started thinking about what I’ve experienced over the last month or so. I tried to decide if there was anything that I would want to keep in my life, and changes that I would want to make permanent, after things — “go back to normal.” It’s not so much about keeping, because everything right now is honestly pretty hideous; I don’t want to keep anything to do with this pandemic once the coronavirus goes back to lurking in the shadows. But the author makes the point that we have a unique opportunity now to step outside of our daily lives and regular routines, and observe,and make decisions about what we really want, what we need, what we want our new normal to look like. Everything will change, we all agree: so the question is, what do we want to keep in the new world after Covid-19, and what do we want to discard?

The first thing that came to mind is something I do not want to keep after the quarantine ends: teaching remotely. When it started, I joked that this was the dream: teaching without actually having to see and interact with students — and also, largely, teaching without grading. I’ve joked for years that teaching would be 1000% better if I just didn’t have any students. Well, now I sort of don’t have any; and since we can’t guarantee access to online material for all students, the school’s policy is that no grades can be applied that would lower the students’  grades from what they were before the quarantine started; so there’s not much grading to be done.

And I hate it. I miss my students. I miss talking to them personally, about their lives and their joys and sadnesses; I miss answering their random-ass questions; I miss being able to interact them while I teach them, because, it turns out, teaching people who aren’t there in front of you is not good. It’s hard enough to get teenagers to participate voluntarily; take them out of the room and put them at home behind a video camera, and participation essentially stops dead. I run a discussion class because that is both the most effective and the most interesting way to teach literature, and now I’m forced to do little more than lecture to a silent room. And it sucks. I miss being good at my job.

However: while I’ve been doing the distance learning online, I’ve been reading The God of Small Things to my AP Literature class; it’s an incredible novel  that I’ve written about before, and reading it to them has so far been worth the time. It works fairly well online, because they can relax and listen to me read; I like that it is helping them reduce stress while also helping them experience the story. It may be somewhat different in the classroom, but also, students need to reduce stress pretty much all the time; that’s not going to change by next spring. So I think I will do it again next year, when I have them in front of me. I think it will be worth it to shift other parts of the class to homework and independent study, and really use the time in class to understand and appreciate this work. So I guess I’ll — keep — that. Also, I am pretty happy to not be grading anything. Sadly, I won’t be allowed to keep that aspect. Ah, well. C’est la guerre.

I miss my coworkers, too. I talk to them pretty regularly through social media and texts, and we’ve been having weekly video chats; but it’s made me realize that I like having them around more than I thought I did. I’d like to spend a bit more time being a bit more social. I think I’ve probably focused too much on my introversion, using that as an excuse to not spend more time talking to people I like talking to; I should stop that. I am an introvert, and there are definitely days, especially as a teacher surrounded by teenagers who demand far more attention than I could give, let alone am willing to give, when I just want to go home and not talk to another human (My wife of course does not count: she is a goddess.); but most days, I think I should stop in to my friends’ classrooms and say Hi.

The dogs and I have been taking extra long morning walks, which I’d love to keep; but that’s more to do with the amount of time I have in the morning before work, rather than because of my preferences. I would like to keep longer, slower mornings; but, c’est la guerre. I’ve always done longer slower mornings on weekends, including extra long walks, so that will stay. I have also been taking short evening walks with my wife: that I would definitely like to keep, at least until the Tucson summer clamps down. It’s less fun to walk around the block in 100-degree heat. I’ve been seeing more of my neighbors out and about on the walks, both in the morning and the evening; I’d love to keep that even after we can all go back to driving everywhere all the time.

My wife and I have been good about doing our long-term meal planning, so we can minimize trips to the store (Don’t give me that look: Tucson has not been a hot spot, and once  I stopped going to school every day, back on March 13, we were entirely within the social distancing guidelines. So no, I have not been locking down and sheltering in place, I’ve been still buying groceries. If it helps, I need to buy fresh produce to feed my tortoise. So it’s not just for me.); we’ve gone up and down on this in the past, because in Oregon the grocery store was a pain to get to, so we shopped large once a week and then bought small items as needed, but here in Tucson shopping is much easier and so we have tended to decide what we want for dinner on the day of, and then do our shopping on the spot. But this is better. We’ve always known it, we just haven’t pushed it; I think we will keep that one.

I’m definitely keeping the podcast. I’m pleased with how it’s going, and how it’s been received; I like doing it and I think I do it well. I’m certainly at a stage in my life where I want to stop wasting time on idle pursuits and I want to be more productive; I don’t know that I can always find it in me to write serious fiction, so I think it will be good to keep different projects going, to use different skills and make different kinds of content. I’ve avoided doing things like this in the past because I think of it as taking time away from my main pursuits: the days I spend making podcasts are days I am not writing. But you know what? I don’t spend all of those days writing, anyway. I spend more of them just taking it easy. Which is good, but not the thing I think I need to do. I’d rather work a bit harder and be more proud of myself; that will be easier if I have more ways I can work, and more things to be proud of.

I think I may keep the daily blogging. I did it for a while last year, and it was great, though it was hard sometimes. It’s been the same this last week: sometimes I have no idea what to say, and sometimes it feels like I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing something serious, and sometimes when I have something to write it takes more time and energy than I thought it would, and so other things don’t get done; but it’s good for me to write. I don’t know how it is for you all to read my ramblings, but it seems like some of you like it, and the rest of you don’t do it, so. I will try. I will also not be too obsessive about doing it EVERY day.

That’s probably the big one. I’ve been working on forgiving myself for not being productive, for not always having the energy to do something “useful” or “valuable.” Because right now, the most important thing we can do with each day we have is — get through it. Stay alive, stay sane, stay ourselves: just keep going, every day, on to the next day. Because each day is a new chance to do something more than that — but if you don’t do that, then you won’t do anything. We have to keep our minds on the main goal, on the most important thing we do: keep going. I’ve learned that, and I’m being better to myself on the days when I don’t have the strength to do more than make it through: because I’m aware that that’s the only strength I really need to make sure of. Just enough to keep going. So long as I have that strength, the other strength will come back. I will be able to do more on another day, and I will still want to. I’ve never believed the conservative  argument that people on welfare want to stay on welfare because they’d rather be lazy; I don’t know why I thought it about myself, but I always have. It’s not true, though: I’ve been lazy, and I’ve been productive; I would rather be productive. So after I rest, I work.I want to work. I look forward to it.

But sometimes I need to rest. It’s okay to not be productive sometimes, even a lot of the time. When I can be, I will; and when I can’t, I don’t have to be mad at myself about it. I can relax about relaxing. I have been letting myself do that, and that one, I’m definitely going to keep.

This Morning, This Week

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I am thinking about down time.

Image result for candy crush

Specifically

 

This morning I played a video game for the first time in a week. I gave them up last week as part of my ongoing project to try to change one of my habits for a week and see how the change affects me. I wanted to change my video game habit because it’s been a constant for essentially all of my life; because it can get pretty invasive; and because the games I’ve been playing lately are brainless and dumb, and that makes me feel lame. I mean, if I was a serious gamer, who participated in some MMORPG  or online tournaments, then it would be a waste of time but at least I’d be involved in something; I’d be part of a cultural moment, of some kind. I’m rarely involved in those types of things, and I often feel bad about it — for instance, I’ve seen neither Game of Thrones nor the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, so everything on Twitter right now goes over my head, instead of just most of it going over my head.

So if my video gaming was at least marginally cool, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it. If I felt like the video games I played had some positive place in my daily routine, I wouldn’t feel bad about that, either — so if I had a following for my video game reviews, or if I wrote for games, or even if I played the Sims and used the opportunity to work on my storytelling, all of that would fit in with my more-complimentary views of myself. Solitaire, though? Mah-Jong? Freaking Candy Crush? How do I feel good about those? Surely I would be better off without them: more focused, more productive, more — interesting.

Turns out: nope.

The big lesson from this past week is this: I don’t veg out because I am addicted to video games; I play video games because I need to veg out. This entire week, the times when I would have been  playing video games, but I wasn’t, were all spent doing something else that wasn’t terribly productive. Mostly scrolling through Facebook and Twitter, which I did more of this week than normal; I watched far more videos, which I usually just scroll past. Losing the video games had a minimal effect on my habits and productivity.

I did try: I tried to read more, and I tried to do some research on the Democratic candidates for President for 2020 (Okay, only on Elizabeth Warren. She’s been my pick since 2016, honestly, and I wanted to look into her policy proposals more. I think I looked at  her website for ten minutes? Maybe fifteen?). But the issue was, I’ve been exhausted all week: I’ve been having pretty serious insomnia; and this is the hardest time for teachers because we have to drag both ourselves and our students through the last few weeks; and there have been stressful things going on for my friends, which has affected me for their sakes; and I’ve been trying to find a new place to live. So it was not a good week for productivity: it was, if I may paraphrase Monty Python, a week for lying down and avoiding. Even my reading, which is one of my other preferred relaxations and escapes, was no good for this week: I’m reading a history of philosophy, written by the mathematician/logician/philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom I admire enormously, but who is always more interested in math than anything else, and whose writing requires quite a lot of focus and effort to get through with full comprehension. So even reading was exhausting.

But when I did find the time and energy to be productive, I did it well: I pursued housing diligently all week; I kept up with my classes and got a lot of grading done; last night I finished a lengthy short story I’ve been working on as a present. I’ve been blogging faithfully all week, and with some pretty substantial posts. It’s been a productive week, considering my circumstances. Just — not because I stopped playing Solitaire.

Leaving behind the video games didn’t make me happier, and didn’t make me more productive. So back they come.

I did learn that if I’m going to pursue anything serious on social media — try to expand my book sales or the following for this blog — I need to improve my use of the platforms. There is no reason whatsoever why I didn’t find new accounts on Twitter and new blogs on WordPress for me to follow; I just didn’t. So I think there will come a week soon when I set aside time every day to do that, and see if I can make a new, useful habit.

Not this week, though. This week is still everything stressful: my friends are still struggling; my rental search is still ongoing; schoolwork and students are still dragging me down. I’ve slept better this weekend, but we’ll see how that goes when I go back to work.

So this week, I asked my wife what I should give up.

She said, “Gum.”

“I don’t chew gum,” I said.

She nodded. “Exactly. Think how easy it will be.” I laughed, and she added, “You think I’m going to make it hard on you? Really?”

I love my wife. And so I’m going to take her suggestion.

I am going to make it slightly harder on myself: I’m going to give up snacks for the week. I come home pretty much every day and eat some kind of salty finger food, pretzels or peanuts or Cheez-its or potato chips; and we frequently have a little ice cream or a couple of cookies for dessert. I rarely eat those things because I’m actually hungry; just because I want some comfort, something to keep me awake. I don’t think I need to use food for that. So I’m going to give all that up, and only eat the major meals, and maybe an apple in the afternoon — I am a teacher, after all; apples sort of come with the job, right?

But if it comes down to it? I’ll let myself slide on everything that isn’t gum.

That’s what my wife told me to do.