Why do I cling so hard to organization? Calendars, color coding, lists, syllabi, due dates, and more. Why? They make me less anxious about what I have to do, sure. Where did I learn this? Not from my parents, certainly. Not from any teacher. I guess it sort of started in high school out of…necessity? But it couldn’t have been necessity, because I floated through weeks not knowing what day it was, yet still having everything done that needed doing.
I didn’t even use the organization I had in high school. I was picky about planners and meticulous about writing everything down that was due or to do, but I never referred back to them. I wrote things down, remembered them, did them, done. I remember being TSgt Harris’s poster child for using a planner.
I really don’t know where this came from in such…full force. Now, if it’s not in my planner, it’s not happening. My planner and digital calendar are very specifically and unvaryingly color coded. I’m even pickier about planners now. Everything must be written down and referred back to and checked and double checked. I’ve always been goal oriented and organized, but never quite this obsessive in either of those ways. And that really is the right word for it: obsessive. I live on 3 calendars and my brain has been preoccupied for several days with the idea of a fourth.
There’s this image in my head of a calendar. A pretty big calendar. Four months (the remainder of the semester), and I can see them all at once. The days are each big enough for me to write a list on. Instead of a running list of things to do, this is a calendar of due dates, each day containing a list of things that are due then. I can see everything task, assignment, memorization deadline and its due date, right there on the calendar. All color coded in my way, of course. Checked off when things are done, of course. When February is done, I’d probably leave it on the wall. It would say “I did these things,” and “These are the things I failed at, forgot, didn’t do, didn’t make time for.”
I wanted a calendar like this last semester, but it seemed so impossible. I’ve been thinking about it even more lately, and finally visualizing it as something that could exist. That’s when these images crept in. But every time I try to imagine how I’d want it, I inevitably come to how big it would need to be, and it keeps needing to be bigger and bigger, until it takes up the whole north wall of my bedroom, and then it looms and grows teeth and keeps growing and growing until it looks like a Word document you accidentally zoomed in to 400% and all you can see are three letters.
I like being organized…until it scares me.
