I spent a disproportionate number of April workdays on one task (because I am, unfortunately, fueled by spite and wanted to prove someone wrong about something that ended up being mostly inconsequential).
I was “late” for a July deadline (that I imposed on myself)(…I finished with two days to spare), so I punished myself by working more than a week ahead of a personal project milestone in September. (I’ll explain this project more later, when I like it again).
I took a break (read that as “built a neighborhood of Sims 4 houses”) yesterday because my brain insisted and woke up this morning full of dread. I was exhausted within an hour, every ounce of energy straight up sapped by self-loathing. Huh?
A series of “funny” events (I promise it’s all related):
I was smart once, in the way kids who win spelling bees and participate in Math Field Days are smart. (I was never Golden Horseshoe smart and that’s what I really wanted—I made up for this in adulthood. “Made up for it” and then some. Don’t get me started on enclosure in West Virginia!)
Then I wasn’t anymore. Algebra was forced on me and an English teacher gave me a B on a quiz because he was very, very sure “hamster” was spelled “hampster.” (This was the inciting event of the “funniest” part of this story.) Hanson was more important and I spent most of my free time using landscape design software as a game. Then I found 311, and 311 shows, and secondhand marijuana smoke, and firsthand marijuana smoke. All downhill from there!
I was meant to be in the smart kids English class when I started high school. That lasted for half a syllabus review period. I asked if a field trip was mandatory (field trips struck a bizarre terror in me, but no one knew that then) and the teacher saw an opportunity to verbally abuse a teenager, and boy did she ever take it. I was a loser, a big loser, a big loser who would never graduate, a big loser who would never graduate and definitely wouldn’t go to college or get a job.
All because I didn’t want to see Romeo and Juliet. Jesus.
I still hate Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, she also taught the dumb kids English class. I realized in retrospect that she likely felt at least a little guilty. I turned in zero homework, did no book reports, and still passed.
One great thing about living in a town of 800-ish people served by one school is that you might end up with the same teachers your parents had. A great thing about that is that sometimes those teachers remember your parents, and sometimes those memories are bad. My 10th-grade English teacher hated my dad, and because I knew that, I spent a year waiting to be yelled at. When it happened it was actually my fault—I kept a rubber band wrapped around the end of my pen, and I fidgeted with that rubber band. And then the rubber band snapped. And flew from the back of the room to his desk in the front. Self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe.
Out of every class I took in high school, though, that’s the only one I remember with any kind of clarity. We treated music as literature. We watched Logan’s Run for some reason. The boys learned how to knot ties. We were forced to watch CNN on the day the US invaded Iraq. Ask me how I became the person I am and I’ll point first to that class, then to the Anti-Racist Action table at the first 311 show I went to in Columbus.
I left school the following year, for a variety of reasons. I was very far behind, credits- and attendance-wise. I hated everything and was bullied relentlessly from all angles because I wouldn’t go to church. The district thought I was homeschooled. I was certainly at home, but I wasn’t participating in very much schooling. I found out that the state didn’t agree with the district that I was behind. I took one class by mail—finished all the work within a few weeks—and graduated early and started college while my former classmates finished high school.
I was a big loser who would never graduate or go to college.
I did change majors and transfer to a school across the state after a year, though, because I couldn’t understand a math class and was too embarrassed to admit it. Math was a personal failure. Maybe I should’ve gone to church because not understanding Algebra was going to send me to hell. (Etc.)
Then I transferred again because it turned out I had a West Virginia education and had no idea how to write a paper, which didn’t bode well for someone starting an English program. I was too embarrassed to admit that, too, so I transferred again and finished most of a programming and business degree. But I still couldn’t admit to not understanding math, so I transferred again, into another English program at another school.
Let’s circle back a bit now, to the “fueled by spite” thing. I started college in 2005 and finished, with an English degree, in 2014. I quit and I quit and I quit and I took postcolonial and environmental literature classes and quit a few more times, as a person more firmly entrenched in a belief system that made the people around me mad.
I was a big loser, after all. Then I graduated. Then I went to graduate school to study writing. In an English department. The bibliography I had to turn in with my thesis (I still think that’s a weird concept but I’m glad I didn’t have to write a paper) read like: Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album. Then because I looked at it and remembered what I was studying: Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Will Oldham album, Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us because I am still me, and Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” because I needed very much to prove that I was Golden Horseshoe* material.
Big loser!
The bad thing about all that: I can’t stop. If I don’t know how to do something after encountering it once, I have to quit. But quitting puts a big fat black mark on the report card I’m giving myself?
I’ve gotten better about it. I turned it off for a long time with whiskey, but I quit drinking five years ago (somehow) and regressed (in more aspects of my life than just the aggressive perfectionism) for a couple of years, then West Virginia legalized medical marijuana and I felt like a person again.
This year, though. Yikes. I’m so out of practice at coping with it that I’m burning myself out at breakneck speed. I must have no free time. I must have ten different projects going at once and I can’t quit any of them. I can’t for the life of me find an indica that slams on the brakes. Not even one that taps them.
In sum: do or don’t force yourself into burnout. Twenty-year-old you isn’t always looking over your shoulder. Thirteen-year-old you isn’t always looking over their shoulder. PEMDAS can’t hurt you. You’ll still be 5,000 words ahead of your milestone tomorrow.
* I typed “horshoe” twice before I got it right. Maybe I was wrong about “hampster.”