Finally. It feels like I have the “freedom” to plan into the future. All because I’m able to rely on a set schedule with my wife’s new job.
Today I printed out five lunar months of calendars — full moon to full moon — into the future and started plotting out and planning, filling them in.
Couldn’t we have set our own schedules exactly how we want them with both of us working for ourselves?
Actually …. no. In theory, yes. But really only sort of yes, and only some of the time.
But the bigger issue, still, is that total freedom (in addition to being much more imaginary than all that) is impossible for the vast majority of people to structure and administer reliably.
On top of that: even if you yourself are great at managing yourself, how does that work with your spouse/partner/family or even just roommates? Pets? Neighbors? Are they manageable? Do they WANT to be managed? Is that really a position that’s healthy for you to be in, where you’re setting and enforcing a schedule for your loved one(s)?
Another issue that’s made scheduling both challenging and especially necessary is my neurodivergent brain. At fifty-one, I’m nearing the end, it seems, of kidding myself that I can function normally. I CAN’T. I have tried. For a very long time. Tried so many things.
Now I am at the hopeful beginning of building realistic, powerful, and safe systems to thrive; knowing ahead of time and for-sure when my wife is going to be at work is an enormous blessing that I can see now, now that we’re on the cusp of it, is necessary for me to build healthy structure into my life and work. It is going to be the first time since we’ve been together (twenty-two years) that I can consistently and predictably count on time alone, and know exactly what days and hours I can look forward to being alone (as well as with her). AND know that the schedule will not change for at least four months (barring something quite extreme happening).
I’m grateful and excited that my wife is for-real employed by an outfit that administers all of the benefits in concrete tangible well-documented terms. I wish we didn’t need this, but … we do. I wish I had done better by us and she didn’t have to work at all. I wish we were set for life. But we aren’t. And the reality is that very few people who are creative risk-takers are also great at managing and administering practicalities. So, for now, I am just incredibly relieved someone else is taking care of these things and I am not the boss. Relieved AND GUILTY. But yeah … very relieved.
Here’s the thing: FLEXIBILITY IS OVERRATED. And for some of us, it is downright unsafe-feeling. Distracting, disconcerting, and not designed to play to our strengths. If you’re someone who needs a long runway, advertising yourself as or pretending to be FLEXIBLE is simply not a safe way to fly. You DO NOT want to make believe that you can make all those FLEXIBLE changes and transitions and still function at peak performance to the specs of your own amazing incredible machine: YOU CAN’T. I CAN’T.
What I can do now is acknowledge and accept my limitations while embracing my strengths by structuring and scheduling work and life with greater precision.
Another very recent change facilitating this never-done-before act of planning four+ months (to-the-day, I’m working on) ahead: I took a once-in-a-lifetime trip alone by rail on a very tight budget last month to see the total solar eclipse. It forced me to plan ON PAPER with a ton of specificity that I normally do not do. Partly because I needed to communicate it to my mom for her peace of mind, but as I forced myself to create and print out clear itineraries with different kinds of pertinent information that I realized both how necessary it was for me, and how time-consuming. And how even with the amount of time and thought and care I invested in it, I STILL left many things undone and it was only by luck and the love of my wife that I had enough money to eat every day and other resources I hadn’t done a great job of pinpointing and securing ahead of time.
You would think by now I would be a master at such things, but I habitually do things very last minute and never to the level of coherence or completion I should to be fully prepared, safe and proud. When you’re young, you can get away with that (and it’s even helpful to do a lot of shit half-assed and in blissful ignorance, but I am (we are both) getting too old for that to be comfortable.
It is not healthy or even safe at this stage of life when I need to be able to depend on myself to still be winging it on the daily. Up to now I have not had any dependents (like children) to force me into this space, but I am at the end of my tether not being able to take care of myself and my wife reliably. It feels unstable (it IS unstable) and makes me deeply unhappy, ashamed, and afraid. The cumulative effect of hourly uncertainty over decades is highly stressful, dysfunctional and sad, especially for someone who is super sensitive to the sounds and vibrations of unpredictable moving parts.
ANYWAY. This is a long process-journal logging some progress I’ve made, things I’ve learned, changes we’re experiencing, and current runway I’m builing: on paper, more than a season of days I can rely on being fleshed out to fulfill some goals and set some routines before the leaves that are green now change colors in the fall.
The real freedom for me now is in being able to see the runway ahead, know it is spacious enough for my build and my engines, know my destinations and the amount of time I have to get there, foresee some of the likely bad weather, and plan and prepare all of the things I need to get to where I want to go safely. With excellence and joy.
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