Ideas In Piles On The Floor

This post was republished from the archive of my previous blog as a means of record-keeping. To read SaraEileen.com from the beginning of the site’s history, start here.

When should you have a plan?

I am 26 next month. I don’t have a plan. This frustrates me.

Usually when I say I don’t have a plan, and this frustrates me, people treat me like I’m crazy. “Of course you don’t have a plan,” they say, “you’re twenty-five years old.” Thing is, they’ve been saying this to me since I was eighteen. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought then, either.

That’s not to say that I don’t have a list of goals to accomplish. I have many lists, most of them high-flying and wishful, rarely practical daydreams. But they aren’t smart. There’s no here-to-there, no next steps. I have always had a real yearning to travel, and to become independent, and have the freedom to act in ways that are spontaneous.

This could seem completely counterintuitive to the idea that I’d like to have a neatly regimented list of next steps. But it’s not; I don’t think having a plan is at cross-purposes with wanting to remain spontaneous. I think, in fact, that the only way I’m going to be able to take those spontaneous opportunities – move to Paris, teach English in Japan – is if I have a plan that supports them.

But I sit down and look at the idea of making a plan for the year of my life, for example, and I feel completely overwhelmed. Too many threads in too many botched and tangled directions, and here’s me in the middle of this awful mess sitting helpless and waving my hands like broken butterflies.

I said earlier today that I’ve been feeling depressed, and had a hard time sharing it. I have always had a hard time sharing these things; they make me feel like I have a bulls-eye on my chest and I could be hurt at any moment. I would like to stop doing that. Equating my own vulnerability with stupidity and weakness is an extremely bad habit, both unproductive and dangerous.

I had intended to make this blog a more professional place, somewhere I could speak to the way my writing has developed, and the field(s) I’m working in. Thing is, the professional and personal in my life are intricately linked right now, so in some ways although this is an excessively self-indulgent, whiney kind of post, it is also relevant.

I have hundreds of ideas for personal projects. So many, in fact, that they often become buried upon one another without ever really bearing fruit. I suspect this is common of creative people – it is not a shortage of ideas that is the issue, it is a shortage of focus. I’m tired of the frustrated, melancholy mess I’ve made of myself. I have no patience for myself like this. I’m thinking I will make a pile of my ideas and start sorting them, so that I can put the bad ones to bed and bring the good ones out into the light for a while.