When I wrote last month’s post about figuring out your bare minimum operational costs, it got me digging into mine both personally and professionally…(gotta practice what you preach right?!)
It was a mess.
I am someone who prides herself on simple, easy, clean, and minimal systems…ugh…
I found myself digging through 4 spreadsheets, two journals and other various google documents from another life (a name change ago).
I hit a wall. What I thought was a clean, easy organized system looked like pages ripped from a physics textbook written in another language (and I don’t understand either of those topics.)
This is the part that no one wants to mention, talk to or tell you about. Because then you would never start cleaning up or looking at anything. For good reason.
It’s going to get messier and it’s going to suck when you start to clean things up. It’s inevitable. It will happen.
It is also likely to get worse! It will take longer and continually frustrate you…
You will question why this is a good idea. You will try to ignore the parts that make you crazy. (And you may or may not be successful at that for any amount of time.)
Still, the messiness, the reliving of the bad (more than the good) choices, the agonies and despair that might come up, the fact that it is taking…just…so…long…
The questions that you ask yourself pertaining to the messiness, the choices, the thought that you could do this quickly, easily and it would be “just another thing to do” as it threatens to pull you down into a surprising despair…
Just me? Really? No one else has these feelings when looking at their money? Then you should be writing and telling us your secrets.
It’s part of the process. There is no going around, ignoring, bypassing or dismissing it (unless you want it to wallop you at another point and time).
It is just best to plan for it and accept it. I get angry and frustrated at myself for a day or two and then I remember…”Right, this is part of the process. Just gotta do what I gotta do to get through it.”
That may mean only looking at it a few minutes a day (you will still make progress). Bribing myself with reading time or some chocolate if I tackle one certain thing (whatever it takes). Embracing the fact that I’ve made some spectacularly bad choices – that sprung from earlier spectacularly bad choices, that came from…and then laughing at how absurd it all is.
Soon I’m marveling at the fact that I’m still here and still keeping on…(and I Google for other’s similar stories and definitely feel less alone, more human and usually like I’m the luckiest person on earth since I only had “that one thing happen to me” rather than “all those things.” Or I realize that I do have quite the story and isn’t truth always stranger than fiction.)
It is going to get messier before it gets better. We are human. That’s the way it is. Nothing went wrong. Actually it means that everything is going right. You are living and we are all figuring it out as we go.
Thank you to Jakub Zerdzicki for the Photo above (at Pexels)
