Been writing recently about feeling overwhelmed and trapped in my life. I have been avoiding dealing with a lot of things over the last few years. I have spoken about my marriage falling apart. I hid from that by learning programming and throwing myself into my career to avoid having to deal with my life.<\/p>\n
I have been alone for nearly a year now. It\u2019s been rather difficult. I have had to learn some basic life skills like making sure I pay my bills. I have never done that before. I am slightly worried about taxes because I know they are going to be complicated.<\/p>\n
I am incredibly disorganized. During the years of my marriage I basically wasn\u2019t allowed to keep any of my stuff anywhere in the house except for one room. Even though it\u2019s been a year, it looks like a crazy hoarding squatter lives in the house. I have not had the time or energy to organize my stuff because I was still throwing myself into work to avoid having to deal with my life.<\/p>\n
There are a number of things I would eventually like to accomplish:<\/p>\n
I discovered recently that the best way to engage me in a project is for me to get to plan it out and write about it. If I don\u2019t write about it, the complexity of a project gets overwhelming to me and I don\u2019t know where to start. If I have to write about it and organize it into a story, I get more excited and engaged with actually figuring out what the first steps are. I also feel more accountable because if I don\u2019t do anything I have to write about not doing anything.<\/p>\n
So I am going to start a new series of posts on my blog about me using techniques from programming and applying them to getting my life back together again.<\/p>\n
Right now my life code base is fragile. A lot of people suggested to me that I start doing exercise. I do walk for like half an hour a day when I remember to, but trying to implement a running routine was too much for my system and I crashed and burned. I would like to figure out how to fix the underlying stuff preventing me from being able to do that so that I can add running to my routine.<\/p>\n
Most of my physical and emotional issues are coming from stress. I have had a few periods of my life where stress has made me physically sick. I have given myself symptoms of full blown lupus and multiple sclerosis in the last ten years because of stress. I have gotten so used to the stress from the last three years or so that I don\u2019t know how to shut it off.<\/p>\n
I work all the time because I don\u2019t know how not to work. If I have any free time I fill it with more work. I do this until I collapse. It used to happen at convenient times but now it\u2019s happening all the time and it is interfering with the work I have to do rather than the work I am using to fill my life.<\/p>\n
I also have developed a drinking problem. I have been joking about it for a few years, but I haven\u2019t really had the energy or motivation to deal with it because there were other things that I made a priority. <\/p>\n
Basically, the only way my brain knows it\u2019s supposed to stop working is if I drink alcohol. I had a friend ask me if I started having lunch wine now that I work from home and I don\u2019t because if I do then my brain will stop working. I have hardcoded a really bad habit into my brain that I need to fix before I destroy my health.<\/p>\n
Rather than focusing on the alcohol part, I am going to focus on the learning to relax and stop stressing part. I think that is the first step to fixing all of my issues. They all lead back to that.<\/p>\n
The first thing I am going to do is make a schedule for myself. I do a lot better on a schedule. I know most programmers don\u2019t like them because it\u2019s like micro-management, but I do better when I have a routine. Going on all of these conference trips has been fantastic and wonderful, but they really mess with my head. It\u2019s difficult for me to get back on track when I come home from them and it\u2019s difficult for me to get any work done while I am there because I have a lot of ritualistic behaviors I need to implement to focus on my work.<\/p>\n
I have set up a few alarms on my phone that will bother me every day this week:<\/p>\n
I used to do meditation before I got married, but I stopped because my pugs would crawl all over me and distract me. I am going to lock them out of my room and make sure I spend time each day not worrying.<\/p>\n
I have a couple of yoga apps on my phone. I found a lot of the focus in yoga is to be mindful of your position and of your breathing. I really like running because I can just focus on my breathing and how my body feels, but I am not at the point where I can do that yet. So going to start small for a few weeks and try to work up to something more intense.<\/p>\n
Said before that my house is in a really bad state. I have asked my mom to \u201cpair program\u201d with me to help me get the house organized. I need to buy book shelves and various other organizational structures to sort and store my objects because right now I have almost nothing. I do also have to clear a lot of crap out of my house. I have had depression and I tend to accumulate a lot of junk while I am depressed. I also get really bad about clearing out my emails. I used to keep only about 200 emails in my primary account, but I have ten times that and it\u2019s all stupid crap like me emailing my mom that I got home from work safe after an ice storm three jobs ago.<\/p>\n
The house part is going to be a fairly long-term project, so for right now I am going to focus on doing small amounts of things every day. Today I cleaned my toilet, emptied the dishwasher, and swept up pug fur. Hopefully tomorrow I can put the laundry away from the load I did back in February. I will spend ten minutes here and there boxing up books I will never read to give away. I still need to schedule time to get rid of the books I box up, but focusing on small steps.<\/p>\n
Going to try doing those three things for about two weeks. I am going to try not to worry about anything beyond that. Self discipline is a muscle that exhausts easily and I don\u2019t want to try too many things at once because I will get frustrated and quit.<\/p>\n
I will do a post mortem at the end of this week about how often I did these things and if I feel any better. I\u2019ll write about any challenges that prevented me from doing things on a day-to-day basis. I will also brainstorm about what the next set of challenges will be after I have integrated these into my life.<\/p>\n
Happy Monday! Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Make the most of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Been writing recently about feeling overwhelmed and trapped in my life. I have been avoiding dealing with a lot of things over the last few years. I have spoken about my marriage falling apart. I hid from that by learning programming and throwing myself into my career to avoid having to deal with my life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-hacking","category-operation-destress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redqueencoder.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}