And the Thunderclap

I have absolutely no ability to schedule things I do for other people into my larger schedule of "things I do for myself."

And since doing things for other people is often (to varying extents) beneficial to me, I tended to veer toward benefiting the greater number of people, rather than doing the action that would most benefit me and others, at any given time. But this tendency to always give top priority to and take immediate action on only the things that benefited me and others, rather than being able to schedule "things solely for me" and "things solely for others" and "things that benefit me and others," was not helpful.

I think I was again starting to believe it was ok to do things solely for my own benefit, and was even starting to do some of those things--but then in turn had problems scheduling "the things I do solely for myself" into a greater schedule of "things I do for myself."

When I am only by myself, all "the things I do solely for myself" always line up with the larger list of "the things I need to do for myself," so there is no tension and no time-management problem.

Hm. Hm hm hm.
Thought-provoking.

On one hand, this looks like a scheduling problem, which should not be that hard to tackle in the first place. I can now look at my tasks and say, "does this solely benefit me?" "does this benefit me and others?" "does this just benefit others?" and then decide to prioritize based on my circumstances and feelings. If I feel like I need more time alone, I can choose to prioritize actions that solely benefit me. If I feel like I need less time alone, I can choose to prioritize actions that benefit me and others, or just others. If there is a task to be done regardless of how I feel that day, I can monitor my emotions and ask for more time for myself or get more time with others later.

On the other hand, I am not good at determining how long any given action is going to take. If I want to do an action that benefits me and others (baking bread, for example, lets me be creative (benefit to me) and lets me feed me and other people delicious food (benefit to me and others)). If I am feeling like I want to do a little action for myself and others and then a great deal of action only for myself, and bread baking takes an hour instead of 20 minutes, and then the action for myself, designing something say, takes four times as long as I thought it would, I will become grumpy due to a problem with understanding estimated time and time-frames for any given action.

Hm.

I think I need to think more about this.
I think it should be solvable.

--
The medication for thrush says it is "cherry mint" flavor, but I think it tastes like banana mixed with wedding mints.

It's not a Siege

I was reading this comic today and realized I should probably print it out and put it on my wall.

I think I've always labored under the fear that if I didn't actively put a lot of effort into every relationship, that the relationships (and the people) would just disappear. They, truly, wouldn't exist without my effort. So I over-effort, and lose myself. Gee, I wonder how I could have learned that? *coughmomanddadcough*

That loss of myself through putting too much into the relationship kept me (until a few years ago, when I started having a relationship with myelf) from realizing that I don't really want much of a relationship with my parents, because such a relationship is/was just too much damn effort to maintain. It feels like a siege every time.

I guess this is why I was so pissed off every time I was reminded by my parents that I wouldn't physically have existed without my parents' efforts at my birth and beyond. They were willing to put a lot of effort into having me, but not into getting to know me, the person I gradually became; I had to put all the effort into that, and never saw much dividend.

My sister and I talked today about our mutual feeling that maybe my mother wanted children, but possibly resented actually having us, and possibly resented raising us. I think it's the first time we'd ever discussed it, but the feeling was always there--you know how you're driving down the road and only see the animal crossing the street, black on black, because the light from your headlights catches its eyes and reflects back to you? We were the headlights, and we could see the animal in the gloom from time to time via the reflection, but the animal wasn't created by the car's headlight glow. It had its own separate existence and trajectory in the dark, before the light ever found it.