Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what the me of the future will think of the me I am now.  I tend to assume that the me of the future thinks I’m an idiot.  I’m not sure exactly what it is about me that she’s so critical of, but she’d definitely give me an eye roll if she was here now.

This does seem to go counter to my experience, because I don’t think the me I was last year or two years ago was an idiot.  In fact, sometimes I read over the papers she’s written and think she was much smarter than I am.  I admire the way she would go running after work.  The way she picked up and moved to California.  I do sometimes think her weird for worrying so much about silly things when she should have been more bothered by her very uncertain future and that mounting debt, but I accept that she’s human.

I do sometimes think that 30-something me will laugh at my cynicism.  She will relate more to hopeful teenage me and think of these as the dark, serious years.  She will admire me for working so much, but think me silly for doing so.  She’ll regret the way I didn’t have enough fun, didn’t let people in.  She will wonder why I didn’t have more confidence.

But, I don’t think she’ll be as critical of me as I anticipate.  She will know that the challenges I face are realer to me than they are to her and that I faced them with uncertainty and not perspective.  She will have problems of her own yet to deal with and she will think these same silly things about what the Ashley of the future will think of her.

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This has been a rough week, and I wasn’t able to admit that to myself until Thursday afternoon when things finally got a lot sunnier.  Compared to last week, which featured death and stress and an emotional breakdown, this one was all sunshine and roses, but I kept feeling like it was just one thing after another.  And, when you’re already feeling borderline overwhelmed and emotionally drained, every tiny little thing feels like it could be the straw that breaks it all.

But, then, I got out of class yesterday and it was sunny and I felt good and with my break before work, I went grocery shopping and ran some errands and did I mention it was sunny?  I had to text my dad and say, “It’s taken four years, but California has officially won me over.”  Screw the stupid rain, which I have always claimed to love.  I’ll take sunshine.  Really, the thing is that rain is nice when you can sit by a window and read and it’s dramatically less nice when walking home from work, your flats get flooded with rain water and your jeans soaked up to the knees.

I know I’ve said this twelve times by now, but you might have noticed I regularly repeat things as if they are sudden realizations, because they somehow seem new to me.  It’s just that, I don’t understand my new miraculous ability to survive on so little sleep.  Five hours a night is about the max I get between Monday and Friday.  My dad is a workaholic who has gone decades on that little sleep, but then about a year ago we were talking on the phone and he said, “You know, it’s the craziest thing.  Lately I’ve been sleeping 8 hours a night and I feel so much better.”  Of course, I was like, “I could have told you that twenty years ago,” but I get it now.  You do start to feel super human.  Above sleep.  But, really what you’re doing is falling more and more in love with sleep than you ever have been before.  And, I do notice that though I feel great throughout the day, whenever I so much as lean my head against a chair, I’m suddenly so exhausted I could lay down in the middle of the library and fall asleep.  I actually fantasize about that.  I picture myself curling up in the corner of a classroom and wonder if I could fall asleep there.  Really, though, it hasn’t been that bad. It has, however, made me even more terrified of having kids.  Sleep deprivation is a good way to break someone and I hear the little ones are good at that.

It happened to me again yesterday that I didn’t realize how focused and concentrated I was on the things that had to be done right now! until suddenly they were mostly done and I could finally see beyond the end of my own nose again. I felt guilty, because I have been meaning to call my dad for weeks now (more than just texts and emails), but I can never seem to find a free moment, so I keep thinking, I’ll do that over the weekend when I’m actually at home, but then I forget or still have no time.  And the same scenario plays out with just about everyone in my life.   I’m the kind of weird person who forgets how much she likes and needs people.  When I’m finally not distracted, it feels nice to just talk to people: coworkers, classmates, family, friends.  Something in the region of my heart actually feels lifted.

So, things are looking up and I’m so excited to drink some wine or beer and write and maybe spend some time outside and call my dad (and my mom).  Waiting for me at the end of the next two challenging weeks is a Spring Break trip to Arizona and I can’t wait.  The plans have been set to drink by the pool, which in the last two stress-filled years has become my favorite thing to do.  Lisa and I have also been planning a number of exciting events that will probably end up mashed into one, because after years of joking about it, we actually are pretty busy and important (okay, less so important) these days.  But, there are Rob Pattinson movies to suffer through and Casper moments to reminisce over and a very special 10 year anniversary that I will have to blog about as it approaches.  Priorities, you know!

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I have mixed feelings about cliches. I mean, they are a complicated business. Some are harmful. Others are harmless, but must be avoided in order for other people to think you’re clever. And yet others should be passionalety embraced, because liking them is fun and liking them ironically is a way to prove just how cool you are.

The kind of cliches I hate and think myself above usually come in the variety of sayings that people repeat because they sound good, but either don’t make sense or are simply not helpful. When I was in high school, I said I was going to write a book of all these meaningless sayings and publish them as if they were original or the the least bit worthwhile. Part of the reason I’m not good at small talk or, you know, general human interaction is that I cannot make myself say these things that people say. You know, stuff like it will all work out in the end. I would rather stare at a person awkwardly that say something like that.

Aww, but lately I have stopped resisting like a willful teenager and have begun to find meaning in some of these. I do, however, emphasize some.

The first is that old reliable take one day at a time aka cross that bridge when you get to it. This generally seems like bad advice. Plan ahead is better and it comes more naturally to me. I see now that take one day at a time is not advice for high schoolers, but rather for people who have a lot going on and several things to deal with each day. It has only really begun to make sense to me this semester. It’s not that you shouldn’t plan ahead. It’s more like you cannot worry about everything at once and if there is no end to the stream of crap you’ve got to deal with, then the only way to be productive and stay sane is to worry just about what you can do today. The number of email addresses I have to keep up with is a sign of the number of hats I wear. If I tried to wear them all at once, then I’d go crazy. Instead, I check the work email addresses only when I’m actually in the respective offices, and when I’m there, that’s what I’m focused on. I do what needs to be done that day and then I leave. I worry about the assignment due that week, because even if I start stressing about the paper due next month, I’m not going to start that early anyway.

I think some of the anxiety I’ve been dealt with was a result of worrying about everything at once, anticipating problems I couldn’t yet do anything about–somehow thinking that worrying was the same was doing something. I feel much calmer with this approach. It takes self discipline to get things done in the time allotted, but then those things are off of my shoulders and I don’t have to worry about them until it’s time for the next task. This is the peaceful and productive mode I’ve been trying to find for years and somehow this semester it found me.

This next requires some serious backtracking on my part. It’s don’t worry about what other people think of you. Okay, here’s the thing. This obviously doesn’t work as an unqualified statement, because any reasonable, sane, kind, and self aware person does care what other people think of her. And you need other people’s perspectives on you in order to better understand yourself and, I think, grow as a person. If you don’t care what other people think of you, then you’re probably a punk. Or, you’re one of those people who’s always proclaiming so loudly that you don’t care what other people think of you when the truth is that you really really care. I have in the past been very critical of these people, and while I think they could use a dose of self awareness, I get that what they’re really doing is trying to convince themselves not to care. Because caring too much what other people think of you is debilitating, especially because you don’t really know what they think–you only know what you think they think when the truth is that they surely don’t spend as much time thinking about you as you spend thinking about what they think of you. The result is time wasted worrying–time that could have been spent doing something productive, something that will make you happy, something that will really get people talking about you..

Knowing that we all care what other people think of us, I’d taken the cliche to the other extreme and just accepted that as the way it is. But that was a mistake too, because I let it limit me. I used it as a reason not to boldly pursue my interests. It might be the way it is, but that doesn’t mean I have to passively accept it. I can declare to myself don’t worry about what other people think of you and in that moment take a big risk. It’s not a one time fix, but it’s a mantra that works over time.

Cliches are exaggerations and it’s silly to think that I responded to such extremes by being extreme myself. It’s taken me a long time to realize that finding truth in something does not mean accepting it completely. And, hey, just because it’s unoriginal doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

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