Someday Syndrome

The Blog is Dead! Long Live the Blog!

In May 2006, I started a journey of personal transformation, a journey focused on getting rid of the word someday from my life. For the past two years, I have blogged about this journey, usually laughing, sometimes whining and even shedding a few tears. But I always learned something and passed that learning along to you through my Someday Lessons. Coming up with those lessons has made look at every experience as a personal growth opportunity.

And now my story is mostly told. I know what my dreams are, I'm actively pursuing them and I've cleared (for the most part) the emotional, mental and physical clutter from my life. I've opened up the path to success and now it's just a matter of staying on track and working on my dreams step by step.

I'm not, however, the only one who suffered from Someday Syndrome. I believe that almost everyone at least at one point in their life has let the word someday block the path to his or her dreams.

So, as of tomorrow (or whenever the magic of the Internet decides to accept the switch) this blog will be available only at http://someday.typepad.com. The main domain, http://www.somedaysyndrome.com, will point to a brand new site, featuring Someday Syndrome interviews with people throughout the blogosphere and in my personal corner of the world. I'm also taking on three lab-rats who've agreed to run the maze of curing Someday Syndrome and to share their journeys with you on an ongoing basis. Plus, I'll keep you updated on my own journey.

And as always, with each post you'll still get the Someday Lessons – my own interpretation of what I see in the lives of others.

See you on the other side!

Someday Lessons:

• Recognize when something has run its course and end it before it drags on too much.
• Nothing ever really ends. It just evolves into something new and different.

P.S. For those subscribed via RSS Feeder, you should make the transfer no problem, but unfortunately for those subscribed via email, you will need to resubscribe at the new site. Once it is up and running, I'll send you an email reminder.

A Clean-Dishes Junkie

Monday night, I told Raul that I would wash the dishes in the morning before heading into Bilbao with Cate for her last day. He told me not to worry, just go enjoy myself, but I couldn't do it. The dishes hadn't been done for a day and a half (guests tend to play havoc with cleaning schedules). Plus, there were still things out of place from my birthday party on Saturday night. I couldn't leave the house without putting everything to rights.

For anyone who's known me for any period of time, your jaw must be on the floor. Alex needing to do dishes? Yup, that's right. I'm addicted to clean dishes.

Last month I made a conscious effort to create a lasting change in my life and we'll see how successful I was the next time I need to edit a large story. When I wasn't paying attention, however, I made another fundamental change in my behaviour without even knowing it.

Up to quite recently I hated doing dishes, but then I started to include it in my daily routine. Every day after lunch I wash the dishes. I use it to relax and gear myself for an afternoon of working. I've been doing this for a few months now and unwittingly I've created a clean-dishes habit.

Someday Lessons:

• We can create habits (good or bad) without meaning to, simply through repetition.
• Sometimes we only become aware of our habits when we take a break from them.

The Return of the Victim

Poor Raul. He's had to put up with so much during my Someday Journey, and he hasn't even been aware of most of it.

Remember how last week I thrust Raul into the role of master to my butler? (Get your minds out of the gutter people!) That prompted me to think about what other roles I've been making the poor man play unwittingly.

For those who've been around since the beginning of this blog, you might remember Victim-Alex and Self-Pity-Alex. While I was looking the other way they've managed to unite and slip in unnoticed. How long they've been there, I don't know, but today I gave them the boot.

Most of my life I played the victim and felt put-upon, but with Raul I have no reason to. Habits of a lifetime are hard to change, however, and I realized this week that over the past little while, I'd pushed him into the role of aggressor without meaning to or really wanting to.

How did I do that? By feeling...

Insulted: When Raul states an opinion I see it as an attack. He's not the only one I do this to. My friend Cate once said to me "Shorts on men are ugly." I love wearing shorts (and think a fine pair of calves are super-sexy), so thought she meant that I was ugly. It doesn't matter though what she (or anyone) thinks about shorts. I like them and that's enough.

Resentful: I've talked about this one already. I spend more time at home than Raul does. He works a job that he really doesn't enjoy and that exhausts him. I end up doing more of the day to day stuff around the house. It just makes sense. And yet I end up having "discussions" with him in my head when he's not here about how I do things. I get all fierce in my internal dialogues telling him that if he doesn't like it, he can forget about me ever doing anything ever again. When he comes home and thanks me for whatever I've done, I'm already irritated and put-out so all I think is: "You better be, mister!"

Jealous: Raul adores me. I adore him. I trust him with my life. And yet if he talks about a new friend, or mentions that someone is hot, I get all insecure, sure that he'll wake up soon and realize how little he does adore me and go running off with some guy who speaks Spanish and is so much more together than I am...

Waah, waah, waah!

When reading over the blog recently I noticed that some of this self-victimizing had leaked into the blog, but I've figured out their game now and have expelled Self-Pity-Alex and Victim-Alex from the personality zoo. I can act like a normal human being again. Unfortunately given their knowledge of the inner workings of the zoo, I don't think they're gone for good.

Someday Lessons:

• We may think we've changed our ways, but old habits die hard and we have to stay vigilant against the return of unwanted behaviours.
• Negative emotions are insidious and often we don't notice them until they start causing problems.

Get a Free eWorkshop

I need your help.

Remember that project I've mentioned a few times but haven't talked about because I actually wanted to get it done?

Well, it's ready for testing. So just what is it?

Over the past two years I've worked hard at getting rid of the word someday from my life and now I want to share what I've learned with you.

There are three varieties of Someday Syndrome:

• Someday My Ship Will Come In - waiting for the world to provide you with your dreams instead of realizing them yourself.
• I'll Get Around To It Someday - procrastinating and thinking you'll have time to realize your dreams later.
• But I Might Need It Someday - cluttering your life with unnecessary objects making realizing your dreams more difficult.

The workshop I've put together is a nine-week email course based on the first variety - Someday My Ship Will Come In. Through this course you will learn how to choose the dream to pursue, how that dream interacts with your current reality, how to decide what in your current needs to change, and how to get started actively pursuing the dream.

For the first five people who email me at alex DOT fayle AT gmail DOT com, I'll send the whole workshop at once (instead of over nine weeks) - a $39 value. In return, all I ask for is feedback on the workshop so that I can make it even better.

Someday Lessons:

• Contrary to what we might think, no one knows everything - ask for help.
• Listen to feedback with an open mind and without ego.

Chaos and Drama-Alex

Yesterday Unclutterer talked about chaos and creativity, mentioning how chaos can block creativity but at the same time creativity creates more chaos. I'm definitely one of those who enjoy chaos, especially in the creative environment, but I enjoy it because I create order and find patterns in the chaos.

In fact, I will often let my life go chaotic simply so that I can create order again. Living in order on a day to day basis bores me. I need excitement and a bit of drama in my life. Dishes and clothes strewn all over the house, followed by a frenzied organizing session is a much healthier way, I think, of creating that drama than say picking a fight with Raul (I'm sure he thinks so as well!). Conquering the chaos again and again also gives me boosts of confidence and satisfaction that a constant state of order does not.

Yesterday I indulged in another form of chaos-to-order excitement; I helped a friend reclaim a portion of his garden that had been neglected for 30 years. This type of excitement is based on the makeover madness of lifestyle television. Before and after! Big reveal! Pain and suffering during the process! (And in this case pain and suffering after due to gardening muscles I haven't used in a year.)

Someday Lessons:

• Not all chaos is bad – as long as you know how to harness it.
• If (like me) you enjoy extremes in life, find healthy (and productive) ways to express yourself.

Before (that's a mock-orange filled with ivy, bramble, jasmine and grass):


After (who knew there was a shed and a fence hiding under all that?):

My Memoir

My sister tagged me:

Write a six-word memoir. Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like. Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogsphere . Tag 5 more blogs with links . Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

My Memoir
Someday writer?
No more.
Living it!

Who I'm tagging...

• David Bridger - because he's a fellow writer who shares my love of Doctor Who.
• From the Desk of Janet Barclay - because she's so efficient I'm certain she can easily achieve the six word limit.
• Elephant & Monkey - because I'd love to see the "teen personal development" POV on this.
• Tales from the Middle - because my sister included a family member in her list.
• Geeked Off - because she recently gave me such a great compliment and I love compliments.

Living Change Now

(Part 4 in a series of creating profound and lasting change)

Today I started living the new reality, as if I have already achieved my goal. Therefore, when editing my novel today, I focused on the words, on every detail in the text, but while doing so I kept asking "so what?" The "so what?" refers to the big picture – what does this particular detail have to do with the big picture? I cut out so much text and rewrote a whole bunch other.

The one thing I need to do still, however, is articulate the big picture – actually two big pictures, the novel big picture and the chapter big picture. I know this story deep in my bones, having worked on it for 18 months now, but I want to put it in clear writing.

I don't look forward to that though. As my sister said in a comment yesterday – we're divers, not lookers. I know in the long run I will improve my book for doing this exercise before I continue editing, but it doesn't produce a word count and doesn't produce any immediate progress.

However, as I said Tuesday, I've committed to the process and the change, so tomorrow morning before I start editing the next chapter, I'll write down all the pieces of the big picture. It's like hanging a shelf – you can hang it without prepping, and end up making a mess of the wall, or you can get all your tools lined up, beforehand, measure a couple of times, and hang the shelf with ease.

Someday Lessons:

• Prep work, while it might not look productive, makes later work easier and faster.
• Make sure your prep work is just that – preparation, not procrastination. It's easy to turn planning into a technique to avoid doing.

Questioning My Methods

Yesterday I read on the Problogger site that Darren Rowse batch-processes everything, including pre-writing blog posts up to a week in advance and releases them day by day. I've done that when I've traveled but I've never considered it for regular daily posts. It would feel like I was lying to you or something. It might, however, work well for my current schedule, where sometimes I find myself too busy with other writing projects to put much effort into my daily blog posts.

I'm going to leave it up to you (having figured out how to insert polls into my posts).

Someday Lessons:

• Periodically question why and how you do things.
• "Because I've always done it this way" is never a valid answer to anything.

A Self-Induced Food Hangover

Over the past four days, I've eaten two 170g bags of potato chips – I mean two 170g bags of deep fried oil. By this evening my throat had filled with mucus and I felt like throwing up.

My stomach has been bothering me less, but it certainly hasn't recovered from whatever damage I'd done to it. The potato chip binge was therefore pure idiocy. As I finished off the second bag today, I knew I'd done myself more damage, but I didn't care. I just kept eating chip after greasy chip.

I've had this problem before, drinking past the point where I know I would be sick, or smoking cigarettes well after the point where I knew I'd wake up with a killer sinus headache and a sore throat. I've also done with men, obsessing about one guy or pursuing many until I give myself an emotional hangover. Yup, you've guessed it – I have a binge personality. I don't drink until I'm sick anymore or smoke until I've hurt myself (mainly because I don't do either of them now). I've dealt with my men-binges by finding Raul (such a wonderful man!), but the food thing? I'm not quite there yet.

Someday Lessons:

• When you make bad choices, don't complain about the consequences.
• Growth doesn't happen all at once – expect backsliding and accept it.

Shoes in Drawers

Yesterday I finished organizing my wardrobe. I had more luck getting rid of t-shirts and jeans than dress shirts, but then again I've always had a thing for fancy shirts.

The drawers in the wardrobe are shallow – a good thing because I can't stack clothes too deeply – a bad thing because jeans and sweaters don't fit well and my shorts not at all. As well, I had extra shoes, and some papers at the bottom of the main part of the wardrobe that kept disorganizing themselves no matter what I did. I had planned on organizing the clothes on Tuesday but I had no idea what to do with the two spaces.

Then the next day on the bus to work, I changed my thinking and switched the two groups of things. My shoes, shorts and papers fit perfectly in the drawer while the pants and sweaters stack beautifully in the bottom part of the wardrobe.

If I hadn't been stuck in the mindset that shoes don't belong in drawers, then I'm sure the solution would have presented itself my sooner.

Someday Lessons:

• When you remove assumptions, many new possibilities will appear.
• What assumptions block you from making life easier?