Friday, June 12, 2015

Time puzzle

I marked a webpage and thought it over.  Do I share too much?  Do I sound like a whiner?


How to manage your time?  A favorite topic in this rush-rush, busy-busy world.  It is also a hot trigger for me.  I fully understand that no matter who you are rich or poor, young or old, sick or healthy we all get the same 24 hours.  Day Light Saving time is a useless exercise of cutting one hour off one end of the day and putting it at the other.  TaDa....there are still 24 hours in the day. 

So why my angst over time.  For one, my narcissistic mother worshiped time on the level that was down right scary.  She read books on it and set a timer for us to get jobs done.  Not only would we be punished if we forgot a chore, we would be punished if we didn't do it fast enough and to adult standards.  I still watch her insane obsession of multitasking not wanting to waste a moment so she won't sit down and talk to a visitor.  She brings one task to an activity so that she doesn't waste those moments with small talk.  I understand better now that she used business as a way to control her world and anyone that ventured near her.  Being that I was her child, a double-triple dose was offered up. ....I can hear the whisper of my inner critic, stop whining and get back to work.

Mother would chant:
If you got too much to do
And you don't know where to start,
Don't be a dumb thing,
Start something.


Yea, I was the dumb thing staring off into space...in trouble again.  Please, understand a bit of my complexity....by the time I was 5 years old, I already mastered dissociation.  I needed to, it was the ultimate survival tool.  Time was not continuous for me.  Bad things would start to happen and then they would get worse and then I was at the beach walking along with my feet in the water and time was gone.  When I would return it could be hours or days later.  I didn't know.  I always lived with these huge gaps of time.  I might see my mother set the timer but I would be oblivious if it rang.  (By the way, this causes serious problems in cooking.  Yes, I burnt plenty of meals.  Smoke alarms let me know I forgot again that I was cooking something.)  One of the biggest puzzle pieces was where did the time go?  Until I was in counseling in my 40's I didn't understand what happened.  I didn't know about the blackouts that lasted for days.  I didn't realize that driving from work to home someone else took over my life.  I didn't have a clue that I could keep track of an entire half hour and know what happened to it.  Integration brought me the wonders of time.  But I have all these unhealthy associations to time.  So I read articles about time, hoping to find someone that explain this weird thing called time in a nonthreatening, unemotional, informational how to use time wisely.   By the way, the best thing in the world sometimes is sitting next to someone chatting about nothing consequential just letting them know that they have value and worth by existing and you want to spend time with them.  In all my mothers 80 odd years (and some of those years are very odd) she has yet to understand the value of sitting quietly without trying to frantically stuff more activities into the minutes of a day.  So I found an article that I think fits the criteria of nonthreatening, unemotional, and fairly informational about a system that might just help me a bit.  I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.dailyworth.com/posts/3607-how-to-manage-your-time-better/1

Interesting to me, as I was planning out this post I read a friends blog giving a very different view of busy time.  I am really happy for her that she is involved in a busy project.  She also helped me with understanding my energy limitations when trying to stuff more in a day.  Follow her spoons link near the bottom of her post to find a very interesting post on energy limits. 
Thanks TheInvisibleShadow. 

Busy time....can bring joy.
https://theinvisibleshadow.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/bizzy-bee/

Just 24 hours in a day

1 comment:

Sue said...

Dear Ruth, no you are not complaining. Mean people desperately need to be dragged into the light - for all to see. For injured people to learn, it wasn't (imperfect) them, it was the narc bayoch who was at fault. These two-legged reptiles are every freaking where.