reverb 10, day 11 – 11 things

I got off track for a few days. Why? Quite frankly, I looked at Friday’s prompt and ended up in a deep funk. The reasons are complex, and I don’t really want to go into the long explanation right now. I spent the weekend avoiding my depression and the blizzard by sitting on the couch and watching a whole lot of The Vampire Diaries. Sometimes, you just need a couple of days like that.

Time to get back on track, though. Skipping the prompt that triggered me – so let’s go on to day 11!

December 11th: What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?

I could answer this prompt with a whole lot of high-concept self-help jargon, but I’ve found that being realistic and concrete helps me a lot more. So, a list, off the top of my head:

1) At the top of my hall closet, I keep a garbage bag full of stuffed animals. They’re all 20 years old or more; the toys of my childhood. Most of them have little sentimental value – really, there are only two toys I feel any emotional connection to. The first is the pink teddy bear that my favorite teacher gave me on the day my mother died – my 12th birthday. She came by our house while the adults congregated in the living room, crying and eating and planning, and was one of the few people to actually remember that it was, in fact, my birthday. I slept with that bear until I was old enough to be embarrassed by the fact. The other belonged to my sister; her old floppy Grover doll, the constant companion of her childhood. I claimed it from her apartment’s bedroom after her funeral, as we boxed up the remains of her life. Those two toys stay. Everything else must go.

I don’t need a garbage bag full of toys that have no value. I don’t collect them, don’t display them. I don’t have kids, and even if I did, would they want to play with battered old dolls? The bag is simply a reminder of a childhood I am ambivalent about at best. To purge those dolls would be to allow myself to believe that the scared, lonely girl of 20 years ago is long gone.

2) Do you have any idea how much time I’d gain out of my evenings if I eliminated Facebook’s Bejeweled Blitz from my bookmarks and memory?

3) I have a set of Delicious bookmarks designed to track my own popularity in certain corners of the internet as compared to other people. They do little more than make me crazy – why is so-and-so more popular than me? What did I do wrong that so few people have this bookmarked? What should I do to be more popular? If I was a smarter person, I would delete them. I need to write and post and be myself on the internet because it’s good for me, not because someone else would like me better for it.

4) You know, I had pepperoni pizza rolls eliminated from my diet once. I lost 50 pounds that year. Why did I let them sneak back in?

5) Too often, I fall into the trap of thinking that complaining is the best way to relate to another person in a conversation. If we both bitch about the same thing, then we have something in common, right? But that sort of negativity only ends up weighing me down in the end. I need to get over my innate belief that talking about the good things in my life equates to bragging, and trust that people will be just as – if not more – happy to talk about good things than bad.

6) There are four shelves of books in my bedroom that I have never read. Most of them were borrowed from friends, and many of them are books I think I “should read”. They’re in genres I largely ignore, or are classics I’ve missed, or have been on Oprah or in every magazine I read. I own a Nook now, and do most of my reading on it, so looking at that book shelf only makes me feel guilty. It’s long past time to purge that shelf and get over the idea that I “should” read anything. I read the things that interest me, the things that make me happy. Believing I should do otherwise only reinforces the idea that I’m not good enough as is.

7) I’m trying to be somewhat realistic on this list, so saying “I will eliminate useless web surfing” is … well, useless. But I need to eliminate my first impulses when I get to the “BORED NOW” point of the evening, after all my email, RSS feeds, and Twitter have been read. I don’t need to go see what Oh No They Didn’t has posted today. I don’t need to I don’t need to check my Google Reader to see if any new blog posts have turned up. I don’t need to refresh Twitter five more times. I know what my time is better spent doing – writing, reading a book, firing up the Wii Fit, shredding the giant pile of old paperwork that sits in my bedroom, composing an email to a friend I haven’t talked to in forever, the list goes on and on. If I can curb the impulse to say “I’ll just fuck around on the internet for five more minutes,” I would feel like less of my life is wasted.

8) I really don’t need another round of bronchitis in 2011. So quit skimping on your asthma meds, Jaime. The inhaler is irritating, but coughing up your lungs is worse.

9) I’d love to kick my internal editor – the jackass – to the curb. Can I? Not entirely. But I need to find a way to listen to that voice that says “wow, that idea is so stupid, nine hundred people have written it before, they’re way better than you so why should you bother?” … and give it the finger before I continue exactly what I was writing. I think, perhaps, #3 ties in with this one. I need to eliminate comparisons, to stop myself from saying “so-and-so is obviously better than me, so that must mean I suck.” I don’t suck. I know I don’t suck. Comparing myself to other people is an exercise in futility. Just write.

10) I don’t need to add to my credit card debt any more than strictly necessary. I’m not at a financial point where I can say I won’t use my card at all whatsoever – especially not with a trip abroad to look forward to, and new tires to buy at some point in the near future – but I need to keep myself from saying “oh, I need new clothes for the spring, I’ll just put them on my card and figure it out later.” I want to eventually have the means to buy a house. Cutting down on my credit card spending is the first step to that goal.

11) Finally, I don’t need to reach this point next year and feel the same way I feel right now – like I was unhappy more often than not, like I wasted a whole lot of time. How do I eliminate that possibility? Good question. I’m still working on it. I know all the clichés and platitudes – one step at a time, learn how to forgive yourself, do one thing every day, et cetera – but breaking those down into actual action plans is a little more difficult. The first step, I think, is to keep up with these prompts. It feels like an accomplishment!