Am I obsessive about things that don't matter? Hm.

Right now, the insides of my head look
like a piece of paper that an untalented three year-old has taken
crayon to. Swirly, swirly, swirly patterns that make no sense and
quite a lot of mess, and probably veer off onto the table so any
minute now you're going to yell mean things at me for ruining the
antique furniture.

See: unresolved childhood issues.

I wasn't kidding when I said 2012 was
the year of Fulfilling My Potential. So I write lists. I have a
nine-box, twenty-seven bullet point overall list for the year, and on
the first of every month I sit down and plan out one thing for each
of the twenty-seven bigger things I can do over those next 30 days to
make a hearty step towards the bigger goal.

THEN every Sunday night I sit down and
write a list for the week. This list is divided into urgent,
important, and in my
own time. This means my energy
is focussed on ticking off what is absolutely necessary, and if there
is any time left I move on to the important stuff, then the
not-so-important-just-right-now stuff. PRIORITIES, PEOPLE. Also, anal
retentive tendencies despite the mess.

The
idea is that I'm not supposed to
Do All The Things, but recognise
what is important and what isn't. Theoretically, everything from the
important list should
move into the urgent list
the following week, and the in my own time list
moves to important. Anything
that stays on the list for longer than three weeks obviously isn't
important at all, and so gets dropped like a C-list celebrity on a
televised desert island.

HOWEVER.

I have become a bit
list-obsessed. And by 'a bit' I mean unless an activity is planned,
scheduled, and written in black ball point pen under one of three
headings, I freak out and get sweaty of palm and white of face. I've
become this methodical, logical, PREPARED human being to the extent
where I'm all WOAH. LAST-MINUTE TRIP TO THE BEACH? I CAN'T DO THAT IF
IT ISN'T ON THE LIST. Then I hunt out my good pen, the one that
writes really fancy, and write down 'Last-minute trip to the beach'
under one of the headings and then in my diary, and it is all okay
again so I search out a headscarf and get tanning.

Phew. Close call.

So now
I am in this predicament whereby I can see my progress even after
only 12 weeks of behaving like a 1950's housewife with too much time
on her hands. I've written almost all of My Heart Beats
Only For You (And a Few Dozen Other People),
blogged twice a week, run loads (until a knee injury stopped me), started a
Pilates class, given up Coke with lunch, switched sandwiches for
salad, read more, seen more films, written to more friends and
family, spent less time on Facebook and generally been a more awesome
version of myself. Like that's possible.

But I
also see the looming black pit of planning doom I am lurching towards
where essentially, I am somebody's mother. And I feel helpless to
stop it. It's a swirly, swirly, swirly
mind-fuck conundrum of THE LISTS ARE TAKING OVER MY LIFE versus BUT
THE LISTS MAKE ME LIVE MY LIFE SO MUCH BETTER! And basically, the
only solution I have is to write 'Stop freaking out' under the urgent
part of this week's list and
have done with it.

Or
possibly, instead of Stop freaking out I
think I mean Be less weird. Like,
for serious, BRAIN. Be less weird.