Remember Hannah Brencher‘s Stop Sleeping with Liars? Well, I was thinking about it today and how I find myself having plenty of time doing nothing but double (if not triple) booking my appointments. I find myself with tons of activities on my calendar and not doing them all. I’m not spending time with the people I actually want to spend it with. I have no time for things I actually want to do and accomplish. Those books you’ve been buying won’t read themselves out loud to you dear (well the digital ones can possibly do that). I go through the same experiences and dilemmas and I don’t come out of them any wiser.

Life is unloading a truckload of lemons on me. I’m drowning.

I’m starting to become one of those people I hate. Those who say they will try their best to make it, but don’t. The type of person who is there but really isn’t. The one who forgets…because they choose to forget.

“I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are “bad with names.” No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people’s names isn’t a neurological condition; it’s a choice. You choose not to make learning people’s names a priority. It’s like saying, “Hey, a disclaimer about me: I’m rude.”

Mindy Kaling

Then there’s this thing that I can’t shake off my mind. Something my college professor turned colleague told me before moving to Dubai. He said something like this, “you don’t have to be good at everything”. That’s what I’ve been writing about all the time but I can’t figure out how to make myself find that one thing and actually work on it.

What I really want to say is, that I suck at prioritizing. I simply don’t set priorities. It’s something like what we Filipinos say, “takaw mata”. “Takaw mata” is when you are presented with so much food, usually it’s something that looks so good or something you want so bad and you put a lot of everything you want to eat on your plate and then you taste it and you don’t eat all of them. You end up having leftovers that can feed three people. I just realized that people used to tell me that I do this all the time when I was a kid. Well if you said it in a more polite way maybe it would have stuck in me.

Then there’s a thing I used to blame on being a Capricorn. I’ve read somewhere a long time ago that Capricorns are happy-go-lucky. Accompany that with not wanting to give a fuck and wanting to live life with no regrets, then you have a recipe for disaster. Nothing against all of these traits, they’re pretty good actually, just saying when you put them all together, you’ll get nowhere.

I can’t remember when I stopped caring about consequences. I still do, but not so much, it normally doesn’t stop me from doing things that I know aren’t good, especially those which aren’t good for me. It was probably one of those days when I cried myself dry and I got so sick of all the lemons life was throwing at me and I simply don’t know how to make lemonade. Maybe I did know how to make lemonade, I just didn’t want to.

Oh, you can add stubbornness to my list of traits then.

So… you have a person who doesn’t know how to prioritize and is happy-go-lucky. But… it’s time to actually live, “take the wheel and steer”. I want to start digesting what’s on my plate. I want to apply FIFO (First In, First Out) first. Then start writing in the journal I bought months ago. I will start writing things that are important to me. I will number them. I will allow changes to it only when it’s necessary. And I will stick to it. Because I actually believe that my written self (I don’t think it’s a word, but I will call it like that anyway) is better than my, you know, self. Then maybe make plans on how to work on them.

And this is the lemonade, life, fuck you.