The key is thinking it through

Well, I got about 8 hours of sleep last night, which is great. I had meant to sleep on Sunday, but I got busy so I never got the chance. On the bright side, I figured out how to finish something I started a number of years ago, and haven’t been able to finish, for some strange reason.

I’ve got paperwork I have to complete for my insurance company, so they can properly adjust some of my old records. I have not been able to finish it, for some reason — I think it’s just seemed way too complicated for me to complete. It’s not… hundreds and thousands of people do this paperwork every day, but I haven’t been able to do it. I just haven’t been able to figure it out.

But now I have. It just came to me, one day — all of a sudden, it stopped being an impossible problem. Like the window fixture that was hanging off a loose nail for more than a year, that I would just look at, then walk away from. Strangely, it seemed like an impossible task. Then one day, I just got the step stool and a hammer, and I fastened the fixture in place the way it was supposed to be.

When I got down from the step stool, I felt this strange combination of elation and dismay — on the one hand, I was overjoyed that I’d figured out how to do it. On the other hand, I was a little dismayed that something so simple should have taken me so long to figure out. Over a year, this fixture was hanging loose. It took me a year to figure out how to get the step stool, climb up, and nail the hardware in place.

Was I really that damaged? I had to wonder.

Anyway, this paperwork thing is a little like that. I had an epiphany the other day, where I suddenly realized how I could handle it. And now I just need to go to the motor vehicle registry and turn in the simple form that I couldn’t figure out how to fill out. I have tried reaching out to my neuropsych for help with things like this, but they tell me I don’t have a problem with them, and when I announce with glee that I figured something out that everybody should know how to do, they just look at me like there’s something wrong with me.

Yeah, no kidding. It’s weird, how truly simple things can just not get done… but complicated things like finding and changing jobs can come pretty easily to me.

But of course it’s the simple things that are the most common and the most necessary in life, so I guess I just have to keep going with it.

The main thing for me, these days, is thinking things through. Figuring out how to get things done — really investing the time in walking through the steps I need to follow. I tend to get so overwhelmed in the course of everyday life that when I get home at night — or over the weekends — I just need to take a break from the focused activities and recharge my batteries with some unstructured activities (like naps and reading). But then I don’t get everything done that I was intending to.

Oh, well.

I guess I’m working on my everyday living skills… figuring out, again and again, how to take care of things that need to be taken care of. I sat down yesterday and walked through my finances for the rest of the year, using a spreadsheet to show how much money I would be bringing in with my job and counting how much I was going to be spending. The rest of the year looks pretty good, and I’m going to be paying off some old debts early, in fact, so I’ll have more money in my pocket in another few months. It feels good to work through all that, to think it through and see what’s coming down the pike.

Even if I didn’t get those little tasks done that I’d intended to over the weekend, I got something really great done that I’d been needing to do — calculating my personal finances and figuring out a good way to go with my life.

And it’s good.