The Procrastinator!

Source: http://pinterest.com/pin/213217363580352838/

When my second niece was in elementary school, she and I sat down and created a super hero:

THE Pro-CRASTINATOR!!!!!!!!

She'll get things done... EVENT-u-ally!!!!!!!!

We designed a super hero cape that could be attached with Velcro to an t-shirt, which I thought was genius. I always meant to make one, but... uh.. being the woman THE Pro-CRASTINATOR was based off, you can see why it never got done. :) Or rather, is still in progress. (Said niece is 16 and a half now.)

I read this on Facebook this week and loved it and it made me think of that story. Quote:

“It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.”
— David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness” (via pawneeparksdepartment)


For someone like me, a list of things to do is INCREDIBLY overwhelming. I can't handle it. I've never been a list maker. Occasionally I'd make a list, because it would make me feel like some kind of accomplished grown up, but I would then have to walk away from it because I couldn't handle dealing with it. It was too much.  It takes me a long time to accomplish things because there are usually a number of things that I have to do first in order to get that simple task done, which sends me into a total meltdown.

Like, selling this baby gate I bought 6 years ago for my patio (so I could let my cats out to play) that wasn't wide enough and I lost the receipt for.

Everybody wanted to know how wide it was. So I had to research and track down the brand to find how wide it was OR, rip up my house and tack down my measuring tape.

Then everyone wanted pictures... Well, to take pictures I have to remember to photograph it during the day. I have chronic insomnia and am always forgetful so several YEARS pass and I keep forgetting to take a picture of it. And for me, I can't take a picture on my phone because there is no way to get the picture from the phone to the computer. (Or there wasn't until a couple weeks ago.) So I had to haul out the pro camera, etc. But that also means I had to clean the gate before I could photograph it. And oh yeah, clean a space to photograph it. Have you ever seen "Hoarders"? Yeah, that's what my house has looked like since Matt. So I either need to remember to take it outside during the day to shoot it, or clean my house so I can shoot it inside.

SIX YEARS LATER...

This is the story of my life!

Lately I have been very slowly getting things done. If I am focusing on that, that means I'm neglecting other stuff, because I can only do one thing at a time, but I have to take care of this stuff! So here are some things I've gotten done (just like a big girl!) and I am so proud!

I took care of the STUPID FREAKING BABY GATE and sold it for $10 on Craig's List. That was even my asking price, so WHEWWWW!

I listed my Barbri (Bar Prep) books for the CA State Bar, and other law school prep books, and my unused LSAT books on Craig's List but no takers. I even took pictures. Maybe I'll try ebay.

2 years ago I bought a 90 minute massage on Living Social, which I can't use because I can't handle someone touching me at this particular juncture, thanks. After four email exchanges with Living Social which I increasingly became whacked out, they credited me $45. Win for Emily.

Also 2 years ago I bought a Sunday newspaper subscription through Groupon which I also couldn't use. The first three messages they said they couldn't do anything. By the fourth they told me I was actually part of a class action lawsuit and could potentially collect.  Annoying, but might work.

Renewed my car registration online, that wasn't too bad.

Have to go down to city hall tomorrow to renew my business license. It's almost 2 months late. They make you do your taxes before you can renew the license so this always throws me for a loop! Taxes aren't due until April and you want me, ME(!!!) to finish in December?! Are you NUTS?! It's only a $15 late fee to finish before March 1st, so I will take it down tomorrow, don't let me forget. I have been working on my taxes for almost three freaking months, I think I've figured it mostly out. Ugh.

I have to physically go to the DMV and renew my driver's license and get my picture taken. (Haven't done that since I was 15.) I have figured out which of the 5 DMV's by me I'm going to go for the shortest line, I just need to schedule the appointment... But I got part of that done! I know where I'm going!

I'm trying to slowly put my house in order to move. So while it's still a disaster area, I'm maintaining it just at THIS level of disaster and trying to not let it cross over to the level that's worse than this. And then I got my bathtub semi-clean (win), AND, this is exciting, after a year of asking questions, I am starting to sort clothes for donations. So I have a garbage bag in my room night now and I am getting rid of clothes. WHEWHOOOO!

I had a client meeting today, and I brought some of my spare magazines, slapped a logo sticker on them and gave them to her. That's two spare bridal magazines out of my house. Win.

I sorted through the 100's of magazines that have to be in my house, and brought some of them to my therapist's office and got rid of some of them that way. I somehow got on some magical magazine list where I have like three magazine subscriptions that I didn't pay for and I am receiving for free. LIke a year ago I got a postcard in the mail that said this was going to happen, but I thought it was junk mail and threw it away... Uh, guess it was real. I have no idea why they are giving it to me. Among the freebies though is Latina Cosmo though, and given that I am Caucasian, I don't know what to do with that and feel like I am, like, nosing into something I'm not supposed to be reading when I get it. So I brought all of those to her office instead. Oh, and US Weekly! Which comes weekly. (And I also got for free.) It's fun to read, and I hate to throw it away, but WOW does it generate a lot of trash in my house.

And then I have a friend who is working really hard and dropping lots of weight, so I gathered up the health magazines (that I pay for) and have read too many times to count and gave those to her, so I hope she likes those.  I still have about 50,000 more magazines, but I didn't want to overwhelm anyone with too many at once, but I got some of them out!

I also took some time and emptied 70% of the backseat of my car! How about that! I also found about $50 or more in Suzy's Zoo stickers that I had bought for Matt (to put on letters I wrote him when he was "away" [but wasn't really, I just didn't know that]). I split them with a teacher friend and gave her most of them and just kept at least one of each for myself, and some extras of the cute ones. My next goal is to go through my scrapbooking supplies again and give her more of those because when I tried to give her those last time, I whimped out and only gave her a little of what I had and I could have given her way more. I guess I just wasn't ready. I just kept thinking about how much money I had spent on all of it. (Sigh.)

I'm working on my freezer of all things too. I have successfully kicked the fastfood habit that was draining my back account. So I was grocery shopping a lot instead, which saved money, but I was still hitting the grocery store at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. So both last week and this week when I ran out of my usual goods, I started digging through my freezer. I pulled out a container of soup I froze about a year ago and ate that last week, and ate another one (expired a year + ago) this week. Yesterday I whipped out some zucchini lasagna I made (zucchini, cottage cheese, homemade pasta sauce, everything from scratch, no pasta) about 3-4 years ago and ate that for dinner. (It was fine, no worries.) Tonight I pulled out some brie in phyllo pastry with apples and some buffalo chicken. The buffalo chicken is probably 2 years old, and the puff pastry I think expired in 2007. (Puffed up just great. Me n' Charlie split it.) Also made an arugula salad. I realized I have to empty this freezer and it will both save me money by eating it and be less wasteful.

I think I'll climb back in my room again tonight and go through some more clothes for the donation bin next!

No Suicide.

 

 

My sister got engaged last fall and it's been... interesting. Planning is in full gear and I don't know. It's just strange adjusting to the idea that she's engaged/getting married. When I think of this sister, I see myself in this moment when I was a teenager:

 

 

I stepped off the school bus, and the bus pulls away. It's fall. The Santa Anas are blowing. It's windy.

These big crunchy brown maple leaves blow right in front of me.

I adjust my back pack and take a couple of steps off the sidewalk and into the street.

There is this huge bang.

Like a car back firing.

I stop. I look all around me, and I don't see anyone. All I can hear is the wind. I can feel it on my skin. Like a blanket it envelopes me.


I take a couple more steps diagonally across the street to my house and I hear it again:

BANG.

I stop.

My whole body just cringes.

It's cold.

I look up the street, looking for the source, but I'm the only one outside. The bus is gone, no one is on the street. The noise seemed like it came from behind the house or from below, but I can't tell where.

I just stand there.

It feels like an eternity.

The wind blows.

The leaves go by.

Finally I lift my feet and walk to the front door.

I push it open and the chimes on the back of the door sing as I slam it shut. I throw my bag down, like I always did, and go about my business.

My sister is in her room, being annoying. As she always was. She was always in there, with the door shut; always mean to me. If she wasn't yelling at me, she was ignoring me. That's all she ever did. Lock me out of the house, punch me in the arm, hide my stuff; that is the story of our entire relationship. There is an 8 year age gap and we have never exactly been close.

I don't think about it again.


Until about ten or twelve years later. When my sister was going through a hard time, trying to start recovering from an addiction. She had gotten into trouble, and this report on her life had been written.

Our whole family had come down to Southern California to support her and we were all at the house, on my dad's back patio passing around this big 50 page report that had been written on her life. My brother says, "Did you read she tried to shoot herself? What was up with that?!" Or something.

My heart stopped cold. "What." It wasn't even a question. I just... knew.

"Yeah, she shot holes in the floor. Are the holes here? Did anyone look for them?" My siblings handed me the report and wandered off to look for the "holes" and left me on the patio in my dad's porch swing, surrounded by my dad's beloved tropical begonia plants. And this... bomb in my hand.

And I started flipping pages. And there it was.

She had gotten a gun. And she didn't know how to use it. And she was going to kill herself. She was done; done with life. She had had a bad relationship with some guy I'd never heard of and she'd decided to shoot herself so she'd gotten a gone from someone, somewhere. But she couldn't figure out how to use it. All she had managed to do was "shoot two holes in the floor of her bedroom floor when she heard her little sister come home from school," and she realized... I realized,

I, Emily at this moment, realized why suicide was a selfish act.

In this report it said she was standing in her bedroom with the gun in her hand, and she had just fired these two rounds into her bedroom floor trying to shoot herself in the head, and she heard me walk through that front door; she heard the chimes sing on the back of our front door, and she realized if she did this, that I would be the one to find her body. And that I would have to deal with that.

And she stopped.

And she put the gun down.

And she walked away.

She was selfless, in that moment.  By choosing not to do it. She protected my childhood by choosing not to do it. By choosing to continue her own suffering, which was so awful, she had only moments before been ready to spray the insides of her cranium all over her bedroom walls- she was instantly paused by that reminder. Emily. Me. A child. I would find her body. She couldn't do it. Because of me. Me. It is the most loving, selfless thing she has ever done for me.

I sat on that patio and I cried, and cried and cried. Because I remembered. I knew that day. I knew that moment. I stood in the street, and I saw the leaves blow by and I heard her fire those shots into the floor. And I am haunted by it. And she has no idea. I never told her. She wasn't there the day we all read the report and we never talked about it. I think it would upset her to talk about it now, but I wish I could.

Every time she emails me about the wedding, this is what I think about.

Standing in the street.

Feeling the wind on my skin.

Listening to my sister shoot a gun into her bedroom floor.

We probably will never be as close as we were that day. But I love her.

I WON!

Okay, so not literally. :) More in a spiritual sense.

I went into this lawsuit with the goals of taking back my power, confronting my abuser, creating a public record, speaking articulately and clearly and I did all of that. I won the day I testified, despite the hiccups. No matter what, he still got his a** dragged into court to explain why he did what he did. TRUE. He may have lied under oath, and perjured himself, and he may be a pedophile, but he has at least experienced some annoyances for the things he has done and not completely gotten away with it. He should be relieved I did not return Judge Judy's bajillion phone calls.

Early last week I called the court to check in because it was 8 weeks last Thursday since I testified and we were supposed to hear after about 3-4 weeks. I left a message for the clerk and told her to please not tell me the result in any messages, but please give me an update. She called back and said that the other clerk was typing it up at that moment and it would go out in the mail that day.

As I do in any moment of crisis, I ran right out and did something drastic to my hair. Since I had just dyed it the week before, I chopped it off and got bangs.

 

I was going for Zooey DesChanel... I felt more like Miss Frummpy, and then a little bit like Samantha Parkington, and then I had a good hair day, and then blah... I'm working on my bang skills.

 

The letter came sometime at the end of the week and I got my hands on it Saturday. I wanted to do something symbolic because I have been wanting to do anything symbolic this whole time. With past therapists we've discussed funerals, balloon releases, letter writing (I've done that many times), burning stuff, plate smashing... But nothing ever happened, or the things that I did do weren't satisfying.  This time I needed something to close the circle. I kidded at first, but it was important. I tried to coordinate a large group, but with so many different schedules it was too hard, and while at one point it could have been like 10 or more people standing out in a field with me and 10+ people on the phone lines there ended up being just four of us, two in person, two on the phone.

 

My friend Angie and I drove out to a friend a few minutes from my house where I have done some work stuff and I set up my little fruit crate I use for baby shoots.

 

 

 

The letter from the court, matches, and THE picture I carried into the house that day and handed to Matt's wife. After she finished shoving it into his face and screaming at him, she handed it back to me, saying she "didn't want it" and I said I didn't want it either, and folded it into fourth's, stuffing it in my pocket. When I got home I threw it on my piano and it's sat there ever since, save for a couple trips to therapy.

 

We called the long distance people on the phone and got started.

 

 

I had played with this idea of burning the picture of Matt and I, or burning Matt's face off and burying me. I repeated this idea to a few friends, but they screeched at me, "DONT BURY YOURSELF!!!!" And I said, "No, no, it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing, there's some metaphor here I can't quite articulate yet, but I know there's something there..." I tried for a whole "rise from the ashes" like Stefano from Days of our Lives, but nobody seemed to believe me. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, so on the way there I was just STRUCK(Or as the Mormons tell me "prompted"- Would that fall under the same usage of the term? I understand the general usage as "guidance," but just wondering if this is the same. Anyway...)

Sometime last spring my friend Nicole was prompted to send me a care package. The idea just occurred to her and she felt I needed it. She sent me some treats and this talk from the LDS General Conference about Forget Me Nots. She included a copy of the talk, and a pretty copy of a quote from the talk, and a package of seeds. From the talk:

You must be compassionate and patient with yourself. 
The people you think are perfect are NOT. (The crowd laughs. lol This is an important point to note for ME given my constant comparisons to the life I believed I was missing out on.)

Some sacrifices are better than others.

Be happy now.

You are loved.
Do not abandon hope.

 

You may at times feel a little like the forget-me-not—insignificant, small, or tiny in comparison with others. I hope (the forget-me-not) will be a symbol of the little things that make your lives joyful and sweet.”

 

Elder Uchtdorf

 

You can watch the talk here as well:

I appreciated the gift at the time (Okay I totally bawled to just be remembered, and it just felt so poignant how forgotten and unimportant I am to my own family and how welcomed I have been by my Utah "family."

But I didn't really get it, until this moment.

I was driving, and this moment, driving to this field, trying to process what was going on, and trying to figure out the burying my picture in this field thing and then I just GOT IT.

I wasn't BURYING myself.

I was PLANTING myself.

I was the forget me not.

I was going to take this picture.

Sever this evil part of my life from me ever more.

And plant this old part of me in the earth to grow into something new.

Because I don't want to be that person anymore.

I miss her, and I don't blame her. It wasn't her fault. She didn't see this coming. She was an innocent.

But I don't ever want to be there again.

So, I would plant her, and let her grow. And she won't be forgotten. But she will grow into something new and beautiful and wonderful.

I got it.

Took me awhile, but I'm slow. Thank you Nicole. I got it.

I talked about the Forget me nots with everyone who was there and on the phone, and then Maren prayed. She prayed for me, and the situation and most importantly she prayed for Sydney and the children. I had felt okay until this point but then I cried. I feel terrible for them. They are trapped. They will probably always be trapped. And they have nothing but my sympathy. They deserve so much more and they don't even know it. Maren called him evil and I had never thought about that like that, but she is right. He is. He is an evil person. You can't fix that. They deserve so much more. I cried for her. Not for me, but for her.

I felt for the longest time that I was robbed of my life. I lost my partner, my home, my children, my entire life.

No.

I got my life back.

I am going to go to graduate school. (Knock on wood.) I am going to move to a new place and start a new life, a new, exciting one. I will meet new people, travel and do exciting things. I will be educated and do fun things.

She will remain trapped. Even he- he has maintained the status quo. Yes, he has a high income, but what is the quality of life in a home filled with violence, hate and lies?

I did not lose my life. They chose to destroy theirs. I am creating a better one.

(That would be me setting his picture on fire, shredding the remnants and burying the remnants in horse shit).

We opened it. I won. No money. That's fine. I knew I wasn't likely to win anyway. I believed in my case, but my lawyer prepped me it was unlikely. And that wasn't my goal. I wanted to protected his victims. I am happy. My dream was to be free. I feel free. If I had received a judgment, we would have been dragged back to court for months for appeals. That's not free.

I am happy.

...Off to plant myself ...

"No matter how dark your days may seem. No matter how insignificant you may feel.... No matter how overshadowed you may think you may be. You have not been forgotten.... You are  loved with an infinite love."

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