Lessons in Listless Living

I have always been organized — not always in a tidy fashion (as my purses, desks, and vehicles can attest to) — but my conscientious personality is always wanting to get shit done. When? Now.

I have always had a daily or weekly planner with lists for everything. I love checking boxes. I love circling and underlining — editing my life, essentially. My lists made sure everything was going — wait, let me check — according to plan. I wanted to know that I was doing — hold on, let’s double-check — yes, that I was doing everything just right.

Then something changed. Not all at once. In fact, it took a few years. Here’s what happened:

I lived beyond my emotional limits for about a year. I had a job out of graduate school that broke me down into all my anxious parts. I became desensitized. Six months in, I had let go of nearly all my expectations aside from just physically showing up. On time? Nope. Professionally dressed? Not necessarily. Paying attention? Maybe. Planning ahead? That’s not real. Paperwork complete? Eh.

When I expressed to my supervisor how burned out I was at work, she told me that I may need to start thinking about what I could let go. I almost laughed. I had nothing more to let go of unless I simply sat at home. That’s when I thought, well, actually there is one more thing — I could let go of this job. And I did.

I thought lists helped me worry less. And maybe they did in school, but not in real life. I realized lists held me hostage in a ruminating loop of highs and lows, worthiness and self-defeat, success and failure. All my life I had played lists like a game to be won, but when I started losing indefinitely, I thought, Wait, what’s the point again?

Thanks to that job, I suddenly had an acute aversion to my planner and my phone, which gave me the chance to reevaluate the ways I wanted to bring these tools back into my life. I found I didn’t care to have my phone on me — or even turned on — at all times, nor did I care to have a detailed view of the day’s tasks. I started looking only at monthly calendars and leaving my phone on vibrate.

Eventually, I started putting important appointments in my phone. I’ll admit, I still had a planner, and for about a year, I did both. I liked the idea of not wasting paper, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be completely done with my 15-year security blanket.

The other day I realized I hadn’t used a planner in…18 months. Is that really possible?! Five years ago, if someone had told me that I no longer made daily lists, I would’ve assumed that something horrible had happened and my life must’ve fallen apart for me to no longer need to organize it in such detail. I would be shocked to find out that I actually had a child, a house, a side gig, and a great job. But how is that possible without micromanagement?!

In many ways, living with fewer lists has created room to be home when I’m home, leave work at work, and let creativity leak all over the place (much like breastmilk). When I write in tasks on a monthly calendar, I have just enough room for 1-3 items per day so only the prioritized obligations get listed…and everything else becomes a happy bonus!

Am I more scattered? Probably. Do I care? Nope. In this new state of disorganization I feel like I’ve had more successes than I’ve ever had before — because that makes sense. And I find I’m less likely to think about life with future disclaimers, as if real life is waiting for me at the end of a list.

But life doesn’t exist on pieces of paper.

Sometimes I think about who I might be if I’d never had that job…and I cringe because I think I would still be waiting for permission to risk living life on my terms. Because I would be waiting forever for something that doesn’t exist.

There is no such thing as permission to be yourself. It’s all a risk — trying something new, questioning the familiar, speaking out, trying again, standing up, being vulnerable — and there is no “best time” to take a risk because if we knew what that “best time” looked like, well, it wouldn’t be risky in the first place.

Don’t limit life to a piece of paper.