Back to the Present

Yesterday was mostly successful. I had a moment where I acted immaturely toward my boyfriend because he was rude to me, so basically perpetuating the bad karma in that interaction instead of stopping it. I also really wanted to hookup, and really attempted to, but ended up not finding anyone I was interested in who was interested in me and free at the time, so it didn't work out.

I know the desire to hook up will only go away with time and focus. But, like most times in my life when I begin large projects, I want to be at the end and not doing all the work to get to my goal.

This is a large problem for me. I coasted through life for many years without having to study or work very hard at the problems in front of me. When things began to get difficult and time consuming in college and even in grad school, my methods of procrastination worked fine, and I still got good grades and accolades, but I never got as good at the things that I do that I feel I should have.

Now, I don't work on long-term projects very well. If I can't see the results easily, I get discouraged. This isn't to say I never worked hard on long-term projects. I learned the Grieg piano concerto in a minor and played it with the orchestra when I was in undergrad. I practiced it, hard, for at least a year. And yes, I did get very good at playing it, but I never got it to the level I wanted to, which was very discouraging. I did not at the time see and hear the progress I was making. Even now, looking back, I don't see a clear path of improvement in my playing during undergrad that I wanted. I know I didn't dedicate time to practicing that my colleagues did, so that could definitely be the reason. I never set concrete technical goals, only "learn and memorize this song," and that was not motivation enough for me to really dig in to the work.

I've been doing a lot of backstage work lately, and for the most part, I've found it very satisfying. I have clearly defined goals, I accomplish them, and then I'm done. It's the same thing that got me hooked on World of Warcraft: you're presented with goals that gradually get harder, and you complete them in the order that makes sense to you for a usually well-defined reward. There are few questions, and the obstacles are mostly not much more than you can handle. In other words, not like life at all.

So my larger goal with this new life plan is to change the way I work fundamentally. I've defined very clear goals for myself over a long time period, and I can say unequivocally that I do want to accomplish these goals, at least the body goals. The body goals are latent, unstated goals that I have held since puberty; my goal is to become the physical manifestation of the man I have always wanted to be, to the best of my ability.

I think that's why I'm hitting the body goals very hard at the beginning and still letting the creative goals remain fairly undefined except for setting myself up to do good work on the creative projects that are crossing my plate. I'm hoping that if I get my body image in line with what I want it to be, my self-esteem will continue to rise in other areas of my life, provided I'm working on them at the same time.

I guess what I'm experiencing is an overarching uncertainty about the direction I've taken my life. I've overemphasized academic and creative pursuits while not doing anything at all to take care of myself physically or spiritually. I've had waves of this kind of self-neglect since I was in high school.

So looking at my history as something that I can learn from and change for the future, I still have to say that my overall plan is a good one, and I'm fixing things with the right priority (i.e. I'm not working too much on my body while neglecting the rest). So I'm just going to take heart, relax, and go forward.

All the best,

j