When I started this blog, I was feeling very down (there will be an entry about feeling better later) and I think I kind of got a kick from starting a blog about feeling guilty and then not writing a second post for more than a year. Especially since one of the things I feel guilty about is not getting things done. And disappointing people. That's two things. No, I'm not going to go into a parody of the Spanish Inquisition Sketch.
For awhile, not updating the blog was actually comforting and self-confirming. I gave myself permission to fail in this one thing. It's easy to try to do too much, and to feel guilty not because you're not doing well or not doing enough, but because you can think of many more things to do than anyone could make time for. Not that I was necessarily doing enough, I'll leave that as a separate question and one that won't be addressed here. Here I will just say that for awhile this blog was my symbolic lowest priority. It let me prioritize other things to the low side of the to do list and to not worry that the bottom of the list wasn't getting done.
Right now, I feel like updating lists, and that includes this list. Adding things I feel guilty about currently. I'm giving myself permission to do badly at it. This will be a first draft. And I may not fix it later. It's going to rain this afternoon, and there are things I have to get put away in the garage before that happens. So if this takes too long, I'll cut it off suddenly. Sorry about that.
Let's try guilt categories. There's Family. There's the House (for some people, that's intrinsically tied to family, but not for me). There's Writing. There's Work. There's Pets. There's Exercise, which may be a subcategory of Health, which may be a subcategory of Me. There's Organizing, which feels like a category, but which may be a metacategory - something that I feel that I need to do to take care of all of the other categories.
Also under Me is Learning. I feel like I'm stagnating if I'm not learning things. And there are a couple of subjects that I have an interest in and that I've spent a chunk of time reading up on. Let's call these subjects Nodes. I'll get back to them. In fact, I think that all of the categories deserve their own posts.
So - Family - House - Writing - Work - Pets - Exercise - Health - Me - Learning- Nodes - Organization. Looking at the list, I have an urge to take Me out. Underneath it all, it's all about Me. It's My family and My house and My urge to write. I think I'm going to let Me and Organization be overcategories. Or maybe criteria for prioritizing. And Excercise is obviously a subcategory of Health.
Learning, Nodes, and Writing go together. Let's hit the thesaurus to see how they connect. That was interesting. Learning is linked to acquiring or collecting. Writing is, for me, a kind of sharing. The Nodes are subordinate to both - or a means to do both. Let's call that category Collect & Share.
That gives me: Family - House - Collect & Share - Work - Health. Five categories. One for each finger on one hand. (I decided to lump pets into family.) Now the question is, what category is my desk in, because it could sure use some organizing. Starting with a machete.
