I’m not sure if I’ve written on this topic before, probably in snippets here and there, and it’s late so I’m not going to go searching. As you can see, I haven’t updated in a few days… maybe more… okay, definitely more. Classes just started, wedding planning hit some snags, and it’s been HOT here to the point of delirium. I wish I were kidding. Not that these are excuses for not writing regularly–except that they are in a way.
I have no regular routine yet. I should say still. I still have no regular routine. I have too many things to do and not enough time to do them in, much less time to get that list organized with longer-scale goals too. Plus, whenever I try to set up a routine for myself, it gets too complicated, and I end up being too hard on myself for not getting everything done the way I had planned.
Part of this is because before I was diagnosed with celiac, I was tired constantly. I don’t have that issue anymore, and I can even cope better with early mornings/late nights now. But I also still have insomnia. I’ve had insomnia since the onset of puberty, and it’s awful to try to deal with. The strategies for combating insomnia are always variations on the same things that don’t work for me, and so clearly seem to be designed by someone who never had insomnia in his life, and so for more than a decade now, my routine has been thrown off at inconvenient times by insomnia, if I had a routine to begin with.
Sometimes heat does it, sometimes it’s some little noise that’s keeping me awake, sometimes it’s psychological in nature, but mostly it’s just annoying. But what I noticed while on vacation early in the month was that when a routine was imposed upon my by my mother-in-law, it basically worked. We had time during the day to nap as needed because we were in the car driving around most of the time, and generally speaking we also had some flexibility about bedtime as well–and I took advantage of that by going to bed early most nights. And even the time we woke up was somewhat flexible–though it never deviated more than an hour +/- the same time every day. At its core, this routine was based on what needed to get done when, with some flexibility surrounding sleeping. There was no hard deadline for getting up–just so long as we were at the breakfast table for family breakfast at 8:30AM, after which was family devotional time and prayer, and then we were free to go finish doing whatever we were doing.
And it just seems so obvious now–my frustrations about my routines as a teenager were based entirely on the lack of flexibility to make my routine work for me. I had more homework than could be completed by a 9 or 10 PM bedtime, but I had to be awake at 6:30 AM to get to my morning classes. I’m an insomniac, so sometimes going to bed at 11PM wouldn’t actually net me more than about 6 hours of sleep what with waiting to fall asleep for awhile. And six hours is simply not enough for me on a regular basis. I was doing far too much for a teenager, and not giving myself time to wind down, or the flexibility necessary to cope with my insomnia.
I still don’t know what I’m going to do as far as routine-setting, but I’m hoping I can come up with a doable one organically over the next week or two. I have classes at 8AM Monday and Wednesday, so I need to be awake by 6:30 AM to get there on time with coffee consumed and hygiene achieved. But I also don’t need to be up at 6:30 AM every day of the week, nor could I sustain that since it would mean never getting to do anything in the evening beyond 9 PM (and here in LA, that’s a “late-ish” dinner time, with 8 PM being the more likely hour for dinner, due to rush hour traffic).
In any case, without routine, blogs languish, goals languish, health languishes, and so does sanity. Without some kind of routine, I’ve been unable to make time for God in my life, much less for myself or my responsibilities (self-imposed or otherwise, they’re still important to me). And so then when some big change comes along, such as the start of the Fall Semester, and I’ve given no thought to my routine, this happens–I don’t write like I want to, or as often as I feel like it.
