Promises are Lies I tell myself
I lie, and lie, and lie again - and call them promises.
Aside from all the other times I’ve attempted to blame ADHD for every little thing that drives me crazy and stops me working effectively, this one is the one that really does. I make promises to myself almost daily, and the volume of things that don’t stick to that list for very long is gargantuan.
When I say ‘very long’ I mean ‘forgotten within 24-48 hours’.
- Learn to code? Started, stopped, started again, progress made, abandoned
- Get better sleep? started, stopped, tried for a bit, but there is always something else to watch or look at in the dead of night when I should be asleep
- Eat better? started over and over again. no matter how small the change, it rarely sticks. (with some exceptions).
No big deal, right? everybody suffers like this. The Internet is full of these stories, along with all the magical ways they can be fixed.
The bloody annoyance from my perspective isn’t that I just fail and struggle, oh no. It’s that I have a perfectly good reason why I should stop doing that very particular thing, and instead hold out hope that the minor variation of that task is just the right way to do it, as long as I abandon the current method right away and get started on the variation… Until that fails and I start all over again. And again. And again.
And I do that with everything, all the time. Every task, every job, every promise to myself is viewed through this incessant self improvement lens. There is always a better way to do something than the way I have currently promised myself I’ll do it.
To say that this is immensely frustrating would be the understatement of the century.
Well, OK then - it’s really fucking annoying.
So rather than rant on and on about how annoying it is, I’m taking a different approach.
Take this post, for example. When I started writing posts for this blog, I wrote them in a nice and easy markdown editor on my mac. Simple.
But at the same time I was getting pissed off that my typing skills aren’t all that good - even after 30 bloody years of typing on a variety of computers, I still type poorly and with countless mistakes.
I even took typing courses, which made me good at the typing courses - for a bit, then I forgot, and then it all atrophied, and I find myself in the position where I have to do them again. Old habits die hard.
So I made it hard for myself.
I’m typing this in Neovim. An entirely text based code editor with legendary complications - such as the convoluted key commands required just to exit the thing. Or save a document. Or save a document and exit.
Deleting words and spelling mistakes requires real brain power, because I’ve had to get used to completely different editing modes and key commands to zap through lines, deleting whole words, lines, and individual characters, and usually getting them wrong and deleting stuff I didn’t mean to.
It makes my brain work at it, and for some reason, that makes it more sticky. I can remember these commands relatively easily, because I’m forcing myself to do all my editing and typing (as much as I can, anyway) in neovim, and getting used to it.
Saving a file to my blog is a combination of key presses to create the template entry using hugo, then editing it in neovim, and then using git to push it to a repo, where a cloudflare pages command pulls the updated repo, rebuilds the site, and publishes it. Because I set a target of publishing once a week on a friday morning at 9am, there is also an automated command that forces a rebuild of the blog at 9am, so my magical post suddenly appears.
For some reason, making it more complicated, not easier, makes the work effortless. I have no idea why.
But all of a sudden, that simple promise I made to myself to publish once a week is actually coming true, and isn’t a lie.
Well, not yet, anyway.
And if I can make this one work, maybe the other ones will gradually go the same way.