Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Minutes?

Slept half the day. Which was on purpose, but did make me miss one of this week’s interviews, and that was not on purpose. I should have skipped Tuesday’s though, because it’s at 8 AM, which is more than 2 hours before my usual day job availability. Got caught up in other work business today and had a hard time getting away from it. But if I can get through to tomorrow morning I think I can clear up the rest of the week.

Went to robots and had a decent time. E stopped by, which was nice – it’s been a long time since we talked. Worked on PID tuning and vomited a little at the accumulated nonsense in our never-frameworked DriveTo system. I can’t tell just by a quick read why it doesn’t always stop on-target. It’s not a long way off, but I don’t understand why it’s off at all. I sort of want to just throw it all away, which is maybe a good project for a few weeks from now, but it’s a bad plan for today. The tuning is good enough for now though, at least IMHO, and folks got to see how bits of it work.

I spent some time thinking about the sad I’ve been having lately. Some parts of it are related to therapy topics ¹Which mostly got lost in my not writing weekend. The broad strokes from last week are about abandoning the Kids to a life where they would be badly hurt, and about hating that I have never figured out how to get them out, even decades later. Plus a little about life as an undergrad, the original context for those feels, which is a time full of … Continue reading, which is not a great help this week but presumably useful in the coming ones. But there are some other bits I can address more directly. It’s been super hard to make intermediate-term plans. Difficult to do for myself – it’s easy for me to lose things that are too big for short-term plans and too small for the 5-year version. Sense of foreshortened future is a common symptom in PTSD, and is definitely a factor for me. It’s part of how I can’t imagine my hair changing even though I can imagine it being different in the more distant future, for example. It’s part of the reason I can’t get the room painted and the bed installed.

It has also been difficult to do medium-term planning with several of you you. I don’t need you to do planning with me, but it’s a lonely life when we can’t expect to give each other time or attention in the future. It’s also a place where the world will drive us apart, because the pieces of our life that overlap or abutt will become smaller and smaller. It’s fine if you want me to be smaller part of your future, but it’s a thing you should be in control of, not a thing that you let happen unnoticed. If you aren’t planning for the ways you want me to be part of your life it’s likely the plan will be for us to not connect.

You often agree, conceptually, that you want a thing that will take 7 weeks to get going, and promise that you’re going to do it. But always later, after this crisis, once I clear the backlog of the last 19 things I haven’t gotten done, when I finally get a chance to breathe. If I nag you reassure me that you definitely are going to do it, or even tell me it’s technically easy. But we can’t talk about how in practice it’s hard to get done, regardless of how much you want it or how important you think it is.

We can’t talk about how to deal with the feels of step next, or the other barriers that make it difficult even though you know how to do the task and could find the time. It’s like short-term avoidance in many ways – your brain wants to avoid the topic, you make promises to yourself and others, you feel guilty for not getting it done – but unlike short-term avoidance there’s no next thing to ever push this one along, or even to get it off the list. It’s just an ever-growing list of things that always feel important but not urgent. A list that makes you feel overwhelmed just by its existence because you know you’ll never find time unless you make some other change. Unless you do the planning your brain wants to skip and put consistent work into a medium-term activity that you do in many steps.

You’re allowed to have trouble of course. I don’t speak as someone throwing blame from perfection. But we should try to avoid doing it about the same things as each other, because that’s co-dependence. And we should recognize the ways we all try to avoid these topics, so we can help each other make and keep our own plans and be connected about the ones we want to share.

I need better medium-term plans. I’ve shared some that I’d love help making happen – things like painting the room, getting new legal documents, physican continuation, talking to recruiters about new day jobs, etc. I’d also like to help with some of yours, particularly the ones that directly impact me. But mostly I’d like to imagine a life where we pretty consistently have some future plan with each other, even if it’s small and distant. And a life where we keep each other pointed at the goals we each define for ourselves.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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