Figure out where you want to be, and go there.

I’ve always had this strange ability to, when lost in my own head, to envision where it is I want to be and go there. Sort of like, if you’ve read the Amber books by Roger Zelazny….? And when Corwin and his family walk the pattern and get to the end, they can teleport to anywhere they envision themselves being? It’s like that, only not instant. And, you know, not fictional. Even though I’ve been reminded a lot lately that my life is like a sit-com, heh.

For instance, one time this guy I was dating woke me up at 2 in the morning and told me it wasn’t working. I thought he was talking about the electric blanket, but it turns out he was talking about us. He was out of the house less than half an hour later, and I spent a day or two looking around and blinking and wondering what the fuck had happened. My heart was sad and confused. But my head, well… it saw down the road and up that hill was a place called “not wanting to be with a douchebag that would wake my ass up at 2 AM and break up with me out of the blue, because if he’s that immature about his feelings and that impulsive about hurting people …. do you really want to be with a loser like that? No, you don’t, because you’re fucking awesome and deserve better.” And by the end of that week he was leaving flowers on my porch and calling me at work to tell me what a sorry-ass loser he was, and I was all, “yup. You sure are.” and I moved on with my life.

But the catch with that particular super-power is that I need a few days of total peace and quiet to be able to envision where it is I want to be. I need quiet time, time where I can put myself and my needs first, time to soak in the tub and reread a favorite book and not talk to anyone and still the waters of my mind and listen to the small voice of my True North. Isn’t that a sick joke? Because what’s causing me to wonder where I want to be? The fact that I seem to have, and this is totally my own fault, bitten off more than I can chew. And I’m too busy trying to get that down to a manageable size to take the time to be quiet. THAT’S MESSED UP. I’m a dervish right now, and it’s a whirlwind entirely of my own making. That’s crazypants. It’s like a Catch-22. I can’t clear my head until I’m less busy, but I’m too busy to clear my head. Again, that’s just crazy.

But you know what else is crazy? Maybe even more crazy? I spend entirely too much time thinking “why do I do this to myself” when I should be spending time thinking “where I want to be is on a bus out of crazytown so let’s just fucking hop on that ride, shall we?”. It’s as if I would rather place blame than fix the problem, and that’s just whack. Julia Cameron would say that there’s a payoff in staying where I am, even if staying where I am isn’t where I want to be. For the life of me I can’t see the payoff in remaining so stressed, so fuck that noise. I’m tired of focusing on why I do it to myself (I’m nice, I don’t like to say no, I love to work… WE ALL GET THAT. We’ve read that chapter a million times, let’s turn the page already. Oh my god, even *I* don’t want to listen to myself whine any more, I can’t imagine what it’s like for my friends to be around me.). It’s time to focus on where I want to be.

Here are five things that live in the place I want to be:

1. One half-day a week where I can pre-write a week’s worth of posts on my work blog (product reviews, advice, works in progress, etc.).
2. One full day a week where I am offline, even if I’m still working on things like painting ceramics.
3. One full day OFF WORK a week. Not working. Reading. Playing the Sims. Bathing the dogs. Doing laundry. Driving around to cemeteries and taking photos of graves (wait, I did tell y’all about my new hobby, right?).
4. The ability to say “I’d love to be able to, but I can’t do that for you right now.”
5. More time with ceramics, my first best love, because every time I have time to work on them I want to work on them EVEN MORE.

So. That’s where I want to be. So Imma go there. Come with?