It be like that sometimes

I've had a rough morning that started with sleeping through my alarm and missing Phoebe's bus.

Fortunately, we have a functioning car and her hair was fine enough from being braided the night before that I didn't bother with fixing it today and she got to school in time for breakfast.

Then I had a fight with Iris about whether or not she had to go to school. This is a complex problem involving forms and school officials and stuff and sometimes results in lots of emotional words between us.

This was all before coffee.

Fortunately, both the nurse and the attendance office at THIS school are super awesome, understanding, patient, and helpful. They were not at the other school. Iris is home and sleeping, which is honestly the best thing for her right now.

It's fine. It's all fine.

And I don't mean that in an "everything around me is literally on fire" sort of way, it really is fine. It was rough, but everything got handled and ended up okay.

Ultimately, this is my mental health goal right here: To be able to handle it when things go awry and to not ugly cry in the car at what a terrible parent/wife/person/friend I am. I'm not. I'm fine at these things, I just am a fallible human person and heck things up sometimes. For someone with OCD, that's a big statement.

This week, I replaced the side mirrors on our old car because literally all the mirrors fell off the car. I found a tutorial video, found the parts, bought the parts, installed the mirrors, and was able to run the errand I'd meant to run earlier in the week and get some fleece on mega sale.

I did not angrily sell the car for scrap and cry at our savings account. I handled it.

If this ain't a metaphor...

Being able to handle stuff when it goes awry doesn't come to me naturally. I take an antidepressant and I've practice mindfulness for yyyyeeeeaaarrrrrsssss. It's work. It's constant work. I'm working at it right now in this very second because there's a very big rut in my neural pathways that wants to react in an unhelpful way. There's no one fix and even when you find the best possible combination of things that help, you still have to work at your mental health, but that work has a huge payoff. I'm not as productive today as I'd be if my morning had gone more smoothly, but I'm also a thousand percent more productive than I would be if I were gross crying in a blanket fort, so there you have it.

Today hasn't been great, but it be like that sometimes.

Take care of yourself today. Get good sleep, eat a vegetable, take your meds and vitamins, do a meditate, pet something soft, look at pictures of kittens, do whatever you have to do to prioritize your mental and physical health.

Here are some pictures of Toast and Rufus to get you started:

What Do Plan?

So, last week, my fronds and I talked about why we spend time, money, and energy on planners and planning. A lot of the answer involved a deep love of stickers, but certainly not all of it. This week is about what, exactly, we plan for and about:

What are the actual things you want planners/planning and journals for and to keep up with?

Central to my planning efforts is the To Do: list. This is absolutely necessary if I'm going to remember any dang thing I want or need to do in a day. This week, I'm also doing a "Ta Da!" list to give myself space to write down the things I've done. A Ta Da! list is 100% valid as a motivational tool and I highly encourage its use.

The list stays VERY SHORT, much like myself, because too long of a list is not only not doable, but can be overwhelming in such a way that gets nothing done. As you can see, today's theme is tidying up, which is a typical Monday thing for me to do. There are things on the list that aren't tidying up, but that's also fine. I want to focus on having a clean space to work, but I also need to do some of that work in between sweeping up half a dog and a quarter of a cat and recycling approximately five tons of paper.

I also like to keep track of my current projects and various classes and things I'm doing. Each project gets a little sticker next to it if I work on it and seeing everything all lined up helps me focus on what I've already started. I like finishing stuff and though some things are on this list for months and months and months without being worked on (peach jam, quilt blocks), this helps me see how many metaphorical tabs I have open in my brain.

I do put errands in the bottom left corner there, but I don't have anything out in the world to do right this minute. I like having a place for those, though.

A list of things I need to remember to get at the store is necessary if anyone wants to eat a decent meal. Last week, wet cat food didn't make it on the list, but cereal, eggs, honey, an air filter, and marshmallows did. Poor Toast is just going to have to do with just dry food until next week, but wet food already on this week's list.

Additionally, some parts of my day are blocked out as a reminder to get some stuff done before Bu gets home, when dinner needs to be every day, and when to pick Iris up from whatever it is she's doing. These things happen more or less at the same time each day every week and I have alarms set for some of it, but it does help to have the visual reminder as well. I use the "Good Things That Happened" box because joy and gratitude are important and good for your brain and sometimes, when I feel like it, I write a couple sentences about my day.

I'd like to do more tracking for things like water and other healthy habits, but I've not been very consistent with that in the past. My guess is that it's an issue with the "You're not my real dad!" part of my brain that resists authority more than any kind of sticker or section in my planner that is or isn't there.

Over here is Bekah's answer to this question. She takes a more philosophical approach to the question, I think, and also has an actual paid job out in the world to contend with, so what she plans is going to be different.

Plannering

Why is it that some of us spend lots of money, time, and energy on the act of planning, on planning for planning, and on planners themselves?  

The short answer is that I've got a lot going on and I need to keep track of who is doing what when and for how many pennies.

The real answer involves something between "I really like stickers," and "It's a manifestation of cognitive labor that women are constantly asked to do and I might as well have nice pens to do it with."

I really do like stickers, though. While my sticker collection is nowhere near as voluminous or organized as it was when I was in grade school, I have enough to be going on with and a place to put them. I'm not going to psychoanalyze why I like stickers. I just do. Stickers are great. Some of them are shiny.

For me, a sometimes helpful side effect of having OCD is that I'm super good at organizing things and physically writing stuff down in my own hand helps me visualize where all the pieces go. Usually, there's a daily to do list, a running list of projects I've got going on, a list of this week's errands, and a list of things I need to remember to go out and buy. Fortunately, my planner is a place where OCD has taught me to organize information, but not a place where OCD brain takes over and tries to organize things within an inch of my life. Often, my planner is a place to doodle and take notes about how my day or week went. Today I'll be writing "Sick Day" over most of the morning chunk and not worry about it. Some days are just like that. Yesterday, I did a "Ta Da!" list instead of to do list and wrote down all the things I'd done instead of all the things I intended to do. I'm inconsistent, is what I'm saying, but I know I have a framework upon which to build tomorrow or next week or next month. I write myself motivational notes, I draw pictures, sketch out diagrams of quilt blocks, keep track of which Delphic Maxims I've already done, and so on. I have approximately a bazillion things in my head and having them on paper helps me deal with them all.

I could do this with a spiral notebook, sure, but my Passion Planner has a structure and layout that I like as well as questions to help me be a better me and excellent motivational quotes that get me thinking. Ultimately, that's what I want: to be a better me. A planner isn't a magic bullet that will launch me to success and awesomeness, but it can be a good tool to help me keep from forgetting that I need soy milk and dog food or that this one has practice and that one has an appointment and I really want to finish that thing I'm working on. I'm the one who has to remember the things, sdo if I'm going to do the cognitive labor, I'm gonna do it in shiny marker and unicorn stickers.

We also have Star Wars sheets on our bed because what the &$#% is the point of being a grownup if you have to give up something that brings you some joy. If I have a shiny rainbow unicorn sticker to help me remember to pay my mortgage, my mortgage still gets paid.

Check out here and here for answers to this same question from my two best buds.