In my last apartment, I spent a year and a half being woken up way too early during the warmer months by sunlight streaming into my apartment through the blinds on my eastward facing windows. I thought to myself on numerous occasions that I really needed to do something about this fact so I could sleep in late enough to get some proper rest (especially after my insomnia resurgence in January of 2021) and just never did anything about it. I had already put up all the curtains I owned in my bedroom and I couldn’t close the door because I needed the AC from the unit in my living room to reach my bedroom in order to sleep at all, so I didn’t have a ready-made solution I could implement. Eventually, after I was starting to come apart at the seams, I finally did something about it. It took all of an hour, including the forty-five minute trip to and from my local Target to buy curtains and a curtain rod, to solve the problem. I got to sleep in the next morning and went from struggling with how much light was streaking into my apartment to being able to control my environment again in a way that allowed me to priortize my comfort and well-being. Following this event, where I realized I’d been cursing a problem I could easily solve with a little effort, I swore to never let myself be that miserable about something so easy to solve for that long ever again.

Thankfully, this sort of seething endurance of something moderately uncomfortable is not a frequent event in my life. It happens at work, sometimes, but mostly because my options for doing anything about it are so much more limited. I can’t change the temperature of the office or the speed of the fan in the lab, so I have to put up with whatever the temperature and fan are set at. I can’t control when my coworkers schedule meetings, so something I have to get up extra early to make sure I’m at work on time. When it comes to my personal life and the things I can control, the only thing similar that has actually been in my control (I’m not counting the leak in my last apartment because I couldn’t do anything about it myself without losing my deposit) has been stuff like the mole I had removed last summer. I’ve lived my entire life with that mole, to the extent that I was as used to ignoring it as I was used to not seeing my nose out of the interior corners of my eyes every second of every day. It was a part of my life for so long that it didn’t really occur to me to look into solving it. I did not think that something so persistent and ever-present could be solved with a couple medical consultations, an outpatient procedure, and two weeks of incredibly simple post-precedure care on my part.

These days, the only stuff that is actually only irksome rather than a significant bother I’m so used to dealing with that it usually only seems irksome to me (I deleted two whole paragraphs about two actually significant problems that don’t have guaranteed solutions or even simple fixes because they went well beyond the scope of what this post is about) are the little tasks of day-to-day life that I put off because I’m too tired to do them most week nights or too busy trying to pursue enough joy and rest on the weekends to handle my next week. Things like activating my new medical fund credit card because the old one expired in December and I can’t find a sense of urgency about it because doing reimbursements to my debit card is incredibly easy (I should still do it, though, so I can stop spending post-tax money when I could be spending pre-tax money). Or how I put off putting my new license plate sticker on my car until the last day the old one was valid. Or how I’ve been putting off dealing with my Mail Chair again, since I don’t want to dig through all my documents and whatnot until I sit down to do my taxes. Which is another thing I’m putting off that would be fairly easy to do if I just pushed myself to spend the time on it.

I wish I had the energy that I had in 2021, when I swore to never leave these kinds of tasks undone. When I promised myself that I’d always buckle down and do the work when not doing it was adding to my overall misery. It’s a lot easier to make those kinds of promises when you’re not working yet another fifty-hour week while feeling so burned out that you’re beginning to wonder if it will ever be possible to recover from this since even taking a bunch of time off over the winter holidays didn’t do enough for you that a simple two-week period of being back at work wouldn’t put you right back where you were before that vacation. It was incredibly optimistic of me to think that I could always just do the work and have the task done or bother removed. It’s also frustrating to think how much better my day-to-day life would be if I could get all these little to-do items done so I could finally get a chance to breathe without all these pin-prick sources of stress hovering through my mind.

All I can hope for at this point is a simple enough week where I can go into a weekend with enough energy to do all this bothersome stuff on top of the bothersome things I NEED to do every weekend (like laundry, my dishes, cleaning my apartment, etc). That or to find some kind of little reward to give myself for doing all these extraneous chores on a day they didn’t NEED to be done. Everything I can think of is either far too big (like getting a nice TV since my old crappy one is now noticeably worsening my visual experience with TV shows, Video Games, Movies, and even things like Dimension20) or not really worth it (ordering takeout). All my other little treats, like taking myself out to dinner or the movies or on a fun, hour-long browse at my local bookstore, aren’t really the pleasant options they used to be, on account of the pandemic, so I’m having a difficult time motivating to do the small things that could, potentially, wait a while longer. I mean, I’m still doing all the big stuff in a timely and efficient manner. I just need to find something to give myself the little push I need to get back to working on the small stuff again BEFORE it turns into big or urgent stuff.