Dealing With Stuff
  • Dealing With Stuff
  • About
  • Contact

Past Self‘s Schedule

8/7/2018

 
Picture
Like a winged shoe for speed, except it’s a snail
If I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I would. That would mean having to live through my teens and twenties again. If I woke up in the body I had at age 29, I’d burst into tears. Give me middle age any time. I can beat Young Me in every respect. I have more skills, more discipline, more patience, better credit, and definitely more physical stamina. Today Me could basically lift Past Me off the ground and toss us across the room. When I think back on all of the bad, short-sighted, selfish decisions that Past Me made for our life, I want to kick her lazy butt. It all starts with Past Self’s schedule.

I wake up at 7 AM without an alarm. Past Me stays up as late as 3 AM, sleeps until noon on the weekend, and sometimes oversleeps the alarm.

I’m fit, strong, and active. Past Me is almost 100% sedentary.

I stay in one clothing size year in, year out. Past Me has no fewer than six sizes of clothing in her closet. At her most tired and ill, she’s seven sizes bigger than Today Me.

I drink water. Past Me doesn’t; she drinks cola.

I eat 2-4 cups of cruciferous vegetables every day. Past Me eats more volume than that in breakfast cereal, snacks, treats, chips, cookies, chocolate bars, and other baked goods and dessert foods.

I follow the two-minute rule of GTD (Getting Things Done). Past Me is a chronic procrastinator.

I eat four meals a day. Past Me eats whenever food is present and especially right before bed.

I’m in the gym four hours a week. Past Me spends four hours a day lounging on her bed.

I have a bedtime. Past Me has a parasomnia disorder.

I’m a minimalist. Past Me is sentimental and she saves everything.

I’m basically post-money. Past Me often cries herself to sleep about bills, debt, and cash flow.

I’m a world traveler. Past Me spends our vacation money on restaurant food, soda, junk food, movies, books, clothes, trivial physical objects, and fines, fees, and finance charges.

I’m an investor. Past Me can’t be bothered to learn how to set up an IRA, even though it only takes about 20 minutes, for which I will never forgive her.

I’m a good cook. Past Me seems to think that cooking is something like an astrological sign, or the shape of one’s earlobes; in other words, an inherited genetic trait.

I take the initiative. Past Me has not yet figured out that it’s up to us to chase down our own results.

It’s not that Past Me set out to be irresponsible or sloppy. Past Me had the same desire I do, to do a good job and be a good person. It would have crushed her to be perceived as unreliable. She would not have agreed with my retrospective analysis. I judge her for being a spendthrift and for lacking self-discipline. She reminds me that she was young and operating on the best information she had at the time. A young person can never compete with a mature person on the basis of self-discipline or life skills. All of that is true.

It’s true that I have Past Me to thank for being able to pass a background check, for getting us a passport and a drivers license and a bachelor’s degree and a FICO score over 800. Past Me took care of our teeth and made sure we had no substance abuse problems. Good job, honey, good job.

It’s also true that Past Me wasted a lot of time and missed a lot of opportunities. If we had learned to cook years earlier, we could have enjoyed hundreds more nice meals. If we had started investing a few years earlier, we’d have tens of thousands of dollars more in our portfolio. If we had started on foreign language study years earlier, we’d be fluent today. If we had believed it was possible, we could have gone back to school years earlier, saving thousands of dollars in tuition, and we could have lived overseas, too. Past Me just accepted that certain things were “impossible” for us, that certain things were out of our league or not for our kind of person. That’s the biggest difference between us: a lack of vision.

Past Me has the same twenty-four hours a day that I do. We just use them differently. Most of the things that I do today don’t seem to fit into a schedule as such; it’s a difference of policy, philosophy, and perspective. Past Me spends more time shopping, eating, and being entertained. She isn’t deciding not to go to the gym; she just isn’t deciding TO go, and thus she doesn’t realize how much gym time she is burning. She finds it an unacceptable tradeoff for reading time, not knowing that Today Me reads about triple as many books as she does. Everything that Today Me does just sounds like a lot of work. Too much effort.

Future Me, y u so mean??

Future Me wants even more out of me. She wants me to earn and save more money. She wants me to hit it harder at the gym. She wants me to make more friends, to make sure that we still have people to hang out with when we’re old. It wouldn’t do for us to grow up to be a bitter, grumpy, querulous, annoying old codger. Above all, she wants to make sure that I go out and get us some adventure, some material to dream on, some stories to tell to our fun young friends.

Comments are closed.
    New podcast!
    Clutter of the Day

    Author

    I've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years.  I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago.

    I have a BA in History.

    I live in Southern California with my husband and our pets, an African Gray parrot and a rat terrier.

    #Questioner
    #ENTP

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies

    Archives

    January 2022
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015

    Categories

    All
    ADHD
    Birdwatching
    Body Image
    Book Reviews
    Books
    Cleaning
    Clutter
    COVID 19
    COVID-19
    COVID 19 Chronicles
    Fibromyalgia
    Filks
    Fitness
    Food
    Future Self
    Futurism
    Goals
    Habits
    Humor
    Languages
    Martial Arts
    Mindset
    Minimalism
    Money
    Motivation
    Movie Reviews
    Moving
    Organization
    Past Self
    Pets
    Preparedness
    Procrastination
    Public Speaking
    Quests
    Relationships
    Resolutions
    Running
    Sleep
    Technology
    The Woo Woo
    The-woowoo
    Thyroid Disease
    Timemanagement
    Time Management
    Tiny Houses
    Travel
    Weight
    Work
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Dealing With Stuff
  • About
  • Contact