overwhelmed
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Crawl Out of a Lull
Dear Conscience, It is time to slowly but steadily get out of my lull. But the trick is to do it without putting so much pressure on myself that I break down under it again. Yesterday I did a very basic brain dump of all sorts of to-dos. Today I didn’t look at the list Continue reading
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Can You Catch Up From Being Chronically Inert for 40 Years?
Dear Conscience, Things are getting complicated. My parents are getting old and frail. My daughter is a toddler who needs constant attention and care. I haven’t secured a career and my life savings are not on track. Everything is coming at once because I didn’t get to things in the right time. I haven’t cared Continue reading
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No Judgment, Just Habit
Dear Conscience, In order to successfully integrate a practice of managing a daily to-do list, it has to become a habit. In thinking this throng, I realized that my so-called 3 “basic” or “core” habits are more about following rules I set out for myself, instead of the “micro” “tiny” or “atomic” habits recommended more Continue reading
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Stuck in the Tunnel
Dear Conscience, Nothing left to do but start climbing back out of a ditch. Again. And again. And over and over again. I’m calmer today than yesterday. But I seems to have these dips too often, and they make more damage than what I manage to fix in between them. So at moments like this, Continue reading
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New Year, Old Me
Dear Conscience, If yesterday was a reality check, today was a blow. Mistakes of wasting time usually cost more than I perceive at the time. Today my husband got sick with COVID, which means me and my daughter might get sick too. But either way, I had to take care of both of them at Continue reading
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Sick or Tired
Dear Conscience, I can’t tell if I’m just overtired from not getting much sleep several nights in a row, or if I’m actually getting sick. I hope it’s the former. Either way, I should probably rest. But if you’ve been reading my letters, you know that I don’t have time for resting. I do want Continue reading
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Setting My 2024 Self Up for Failure
Dear Conscience, It’s so close to the end of the year, that simply not everything I want to get done, can get done. Even if the conditions were ideal. And they are not. One strategy is to delegate things into next year. I’ve already been resorting to that in part. And I do need to Continue reading
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Yet Another Day of “Busy”
Dear Conscience, As you know, I let myself fall pray to procrastination over the weekend. In part because I’m so tired. Some would probably say I need and deserve rest. And that might be true. But the problem is, rest doesn’t decrease my workload, and I always need to make up for it. I don’t Continue reading
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Zig-Zagging in Place
Dear Conscience, Yet another setback. They are so frequent these days. I should have done a lot of this work at a time of my life when I depended more just on myself. But that’s spilled milk, and crying over it, or crying over myself in general, won’t help me. I’ve done plenty of that, Continue reading
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How a Messy Life Messes with You
Dear Conscience, Here’s the problem with me trying to unmess myself: I have messes in so many aspects of my life that as I try to focus on cleaning up one, the other sets me back again. The current example is that a partner I collaborate with is in town, and I’ll host them. But Continue reading
About Me
I got my first nickname when I was 4 years old. It was “bakitza”, which means ‘an old lady’. I’ve always been an old lady on the inside. And as I progress towards being an old lady on the outside too, I want to take control of this journey. To reach the full fledged bakitza level with a peace of mind I always associated with that life stage. I thought it would come on it’s own with age. But now I realize that I have to take control over the mess that my life currently is in order to be a thoroughly satisfied bakitza one day.
Becoming Bakitza 