Life is too short to fold socks

Life is too short to fold socks

I’ve been thinking lately about the things I waste time on. I watch too much tv, I read, I scroll my phone, I play solitaire on my kindle…the list goes on. The gist of it is that I’m wasting time, procrastinating really, because I have things that need to be done, usually cleaning of some kind. I HATE cleaning!

An example of my procrastination is this blog. I have been making excuses for weeks about why I can’t start it. I was waiting till the weekend…then “got busy”. Next, I was waiting till school was out (I’m a teacher)…well it’s out and I still haven’t started. I’ve also been wanting to start walking again to lose weight and get into better shape, but I always find a reason not to do it.

  I say I’m going to quit procrastinating, but I’m not. In fact, I think I’m laying unnecessary guilt on myself. I’m accusing myself of wasting time, but maybe what I’m really doing is recovering.

I recently became single after a long relationship and marriage. I thought we were happy. and we loved each other. I found out different when I discovered my husband had a profile on a dating website and was talking to women online. It completely came out of left field. I had no idea that anything like that was going on until I caught him texting another woman.  I left him and moved out on my own.

I’m telling all of that to say this: sometimes we’ve gone through a lot. Whatever it is we’ve been going through, we need to recover. We need to put unimportant or un-urgent things aside to recover…to find out who we really are and what makes us happy. I’ve spent my entire adult life belonging to someone else or taking care of others. I now want to learn how to belong to myself and take care of myself.

My plate currently has 1 thing on it: me. I want to belong to me, to know me, to make me happy and only me. I want to take care of me and learn what I need. I want to learn how to be my own caretaker and companion.

I’m starting this blog because I was recently inspired when I read the end of The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. Ponyboy says, “I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better.” Like Ponyboy, I am picturing hundreds of women who are feeling at loose ends, who don’t know what the next step in their life is, who are aching to feel inspired or satisfied. Like me, they are aching to recover, to belong to themselves.

If only one person reads this and it gets them to thinking, that’s enough for me. I want to make a difference to someone, and through that, make a difference to myself. I hope my journey inspires you. I hope that together, we figure out how to be our authentic selves and to stop laying guilt trips on ourselves when we don’t do things we believe “need” to be done. Let’s procrastinate a little and in the process, discover our happiness.