You’re fifteen, bored off your mind. Summer vacations are starting, and you want to do something new, something stimulating, something that will take you out of the monotony of spinning all day-around like a goldfish in a tiny bowl. You always have a million things you want to learn anyways, so many new activities to pick up. For example: you wish you were more of a creative person. You’re also very intelligent, or so you’ve been told. Knowing things about everything is your entry point into pretty much every topic, so, perhaps, you can just expose yourself to something a lot and it will come to you, naturally, like everything else.
You read about this “spaced repetition” thing, with flash cards. You think of the flimsy, quaint little pieces of cardboard, or plastic, with words written on them. You think about the low-pitch wobble they make while you flip them. You give it a try, and ingest hundreds of words in a week.
Ah, you’re doing pretty good! Time to keep the momentum going. You pick up a pencil, and a little notebook, and you sketch and draw. It’s not great, but you like it, and you want to do more.
The habits of doing both of those does not last, it never settles. Soon, you realize that this is a common pattern you exhibit: the habits can never truly settle. You are, somehow, immune to habit-forming. This is fine, as long as you never need to practice to be good at something. If you need to do something, it will stick, but if you just want to do it? Better be good at it from the start.
You are sixteen, you’ve been itching to draw consistently for months now, and you just cannot figure out what’s got you stuck. You keep drawing. You discover that there are exercises you can do. Maybe you’re repeatedly doing the same thing wrong. You could be missing a technique, a detail so ludicrously obvious that only you could miss it. That’s it! Maybe you lack a lot of mechanical foundations for how to trace lines. And there’s a recipe to get better at it! Draw these ten thousand boxes. It’s daunting, yes, but maybe after you’re done you will have magically acquired enough… brain doodads to be good at drawing. You never did things “correctly”, after all. You’re a self-directed learner, one who is isolated and only ever overhears other talk about their interests, but never asks.
An you apply yourself meticulously to about 1000 boxes, thinking you better reserve your time for drawing to after you’re done. All the while, a pile of flashcards mocks you from inside your desk drawer. You forget to eat, you forget to shower for a couple days as well. On day 3, you stop because you’re almost pissing yourself from not taking time off. You’ve never been good at scheduling things.
At this point, you draw not because you enjoy the process, but because you expect your outcome to meet a certain standard of quality you expect of yourself. It frustrates you to no end: nothing you make is pleasant to look at once it’s done.
At a thousand boxes, you chuckle, mildly worried. Everything in your life so far you’ve managed to figure out, it seems. At least, what you could not make work was inconsequential, nothing you really actually truly cared for. This is different, you want to make it. You want to figure out a way. There’s gotta be a way.
Your sketchbook will not survive unscathed from the consequences of that frustration. Thankfully, you’re too scatterbrained to recall where the rest of your supplies were, despite you holding them about fifteen minutes ago. Stuff like that happens to you, all the time, since forever. It’s something you’ve also noticed, more and more. Perhaps, this will be worrisome to you in the future.
You are seventeen. High school is ending soon. You’ve started to fully realize that you are only capable of slacking in your studies so much because something about you compensates for the fact that you basically don’t put any work in, beyond actually writing things you’re supposed to write at home and hand in the next day.
It will take you ages to realize that it is not something inside of you.
You’re also really anxious about it. University is happening to you soon, and you’re afraid you will have to figure out a system, or you will become overwhelmed. You stash that thought for the coming summer.
If only something could also compensate for that forgetfulness problem.. Or just, not being able to get started with the million things you want (or need) to do all the time…
When summer is here, you feel like your life has lost all semblance of organization. The days go by without you realizing. You’re once again starving by accident, because the framework of your time has disappeared, and nothing reminds you that you need to live anymore. You start sleeping in, you stay awake for 20+ hours. You also want to draw, but you can’t bring yourself to. You want to code, learn new things - this is going to be your career! - but nothing comes. It’s like there is a thick, transparent wall in your mind between you and the things you want to accomplish - no, not even, the things you want to begin doing. It feels like your mind is a muscle, and getting up to do anything strains it so much it is sore beyond use. You feel like you almost do not want to do the things you desperate wish to get up and do. If only you could snap your fingers and give yourself an electric shock to jump-start yourself. Nothing can get you motivated to get up and do them anymore.
“Perhaps”, you think, “this is what depression truly feels like.”
Instead of doing the things you want, you lie down. You read. You browse the internet, you meet new people. You do a hundred million different things, sometimes from the moment the sun comes up to the moment it comes down, while time blurs and your days become noise around you and suddenly you blink, and you’re entering university.
You’re eighteen, it is your first month in university. You’re winging your homework. You haven’t had a single exam yet, so you think you’re doing fine. You’re half-assing the maths assignments that you will be graded on. It feels like doing what you’ve been doing so far, but, for the first time ever, ideas are not sticking to your mind. Up until now, you barely had to expose yourself to the material for it to be pristine, crystal-clear in your head when it came time to recite it back. This time, you actually have to think about what you’re doing, and how to assemble the knowledge given to you to reason about problems… but you’re not. You become sloppy, you’re losing precision. You feel yourself lose grip with something fundamental within you, an ability to self-direct that you thought was a defining characteristic of your being.
Perhaps all you need is slightly more discipline. Perhaps, you need a system.
You remember the flashcards. You remember how you trained yourself for that week three years ago, to remember words. Perhaps, you can be your own Pavlovian dog.
That’s it: you just need a system. A universal framework by which to direct yourself, and you’ll be fixed.
You’re nineteen. You’ve been coasting through two-thirds of your freshman year of university by spending entire weekends in the library, meticulously pouring over notes with a pre-arranged set of highlighters, all with different meanings. Green means the notion has been compiled into a flashcard. Blue means it can be trivially derived from other knowledge. Red means you need to inspect that notion further to link it to other ideas. You make flashcards to link all of the ideas you’ve carefully pulled out of every lecture note, like a surgeon meticulously pulls nerves apart, careful to not break or snap any of them while moving them, and gently lifting them with its scalpel, aware that a single motion of the blade could do permanent damage.
When midterm results drop, you sigh in relief. You’ve made it, by spending hours, each day, pouring through hundreds of little questions, answering them, training yourself to become the absolute monster of an exam machine that is now the third best student of the class. It never alleviates your anxiety.
You haven’t showered in three months. You cannot prepare anything to eat that isn’t canned and cannot be instantly re-heated. Your room is a mess. You don’t party. You don’t see anyone. You don’t socialize. You’re depressed. You haven’t brushed your teeth in a year. You can hardly remember what month it is at times. Some days, you skip meals because you just cannot bring yourself to make food, just like you cannot bring yourself to shower, just like you cannot bring yourself to get out of your dorm room, or out of bed at all. You learn that the anxiety of grades is all that keeps you animated.
You look at the sketchbook under your bed, stashed next to that pile of fiction books you’ve been meaning to read. The system has not fixed you. At least not yet.
You’re twenty. You’ve become slightly more functional, thanks to your own observations. You’ve extended the system not only to the objects you studied, but also your own subjectivity. You’ve started studying yourself like you study a caged animal. You’ve started implanting responses to specific events to remember to keep yourself alive and fed and washed. It’s far from perfect, but it works. You’ve winded down the intense flashcards cramming. You use it for non-school knowledge, but, at this point in your degree, you do not need to rely on it anymore. You’ve picked up a bullet journal, because apparently it works for organization. You’re keenly aware that you have no organizational skills, at all, even about daily life. You started tracking your own habits on an app. You’ve set various reminders.
You’ve discovered that if you set systems around you, then you can survive.
It started one day, when you forgot a cup of tea in the kitchen. When, three hours later, you came to pick it up, you realized it was cold - and also absolutely over-infused. Something lit up in your mind: you started preparing tea for yourself, in the kitchen, before making food. Then, when you were done with food, you’d have (only slightly over-infused) lukewarm tea, ready to be consumed.
As long as everything around you is a system, you can keep yourself fed, you can keep yourself clean, you can keep yourself alive. You can even start thinking about doing things you actually want to do.
It lasts about a month and a half. Something happens in your life and all your habits are thrown off. You have to pull off incredible amounts of focus and energy together to survive it without collapsing in on yourself, and, suddenly, you don’t meditate. You stop remembering to track your habits. Your bullet journal is one week late, then a month, then abandoned. You stop journaling altogether. You only brush your teeth sporadically. Various sketchbooks lie strewn about your bed, untouched. You can’t think about doing the things you want. You hate them. You hate everything. You hate yourself so fucking much.
And two weeks later, you’re once again fine, as if nothing happened, but, in the process, every system was blown to pieces. You have to build it all from scratch once more.
You’re twenty one. You have no systems. You’re miserable, but, slowly, you try and coast along, hoping that something can get solved, hoping that, somewhere, someone has the answer as to what the absolute fuck is wrong with you. You can barely induce this period of intense focus that used to be your way to survive through school every day.
Every now and then, you hear about a new system. You read advice on the internet. Someone else asking about why they can’t keep to a system, why they keep buying new planners and then barely using them. Someone replies that they should be developing routines, and not systems, before describing a system they put in place around their routines.
You’re tired.
You had been drinking tea for years. You’ve heard that, if you had that one specific issue, then maybe it could help. It hasn’t. You keep drinking tea, because coffee is too bitter. It just makes you sleepy.
You’re twenty-two, you’ve slowly adapted routines into your life that make you somewhat functional. You have a day job that needs you to show up at somewhat regular hours. You have rent to pay. You just can’t not be functional. Perhaps, the anxiety is what keeps you functioning. You can still have periods where you’re outputting a lot of work, but those are chaotic and unpredictable. The more time passes, and the less novel everything you do feels, the less you can induce this high-intensity output anymore. Even when you’re high-energy, you are extremely forgetful. You were always prone to losing things, since childhood, since forever, but you never really needed any of those things you kept misplacing. Now, you have meltdowns because you’re gonna be five minutes late and you just cannot find your work ID. It’s happened twice. You ransacked your own apartment, irate, shameful, knowing you should be able to do better, but you can’t. You’ve always been like this, and, unless something happens to you, you will always be.
You’ve learned that, on occasion, when needed for a specific purpose, systems can work, but that you cannot make them work long term. Something about you is just broken. Your therapist encouraged you to take things slow, but your discussions with them just made you angry. It felt like they were also trying to help you find systems to achieve the things you wanted to do. They’d get stuck on the first thing you said you felt unable to do, and then stop and try and find a way to make you do that one specific thing. “You can try to do X and Y to be good at drawing”. You nodded, but you did not believe in what they said. They failed to see the bigger picture, that you were fundamentally broken. Eventually, you stopped showing up. You know it can’t be that simple, you know it’s not about drawing in particular. Or music. Or bullet journals, or remembering to eat, or remembering to brush your teeth, or remembering to take out the trash, or remembering Slovenian vocabulary. Everything about how you function is broken.
You’ve started drinking coffee. One day, at the office, someone said they had started themselves on it by mixing it with a downright abusive amount of sugar, then lowering the dose. You gave it a try, and genuinely enjoyed the absolute rush it gave you. It was horrifyingly effective, at first. Then, after weeks, you became accustomed. You slowly acquired the taste for that horrible, bitter instant-coffee they sell at your local supermarket, and mixed it stronger every time, until it could barely dilute anymore. A moorish brown sludge at the bottom of a cup that had not been rinsed in a week.
You are currently only drinking at most a cup a day. It will not last.
You’re twenty-three, you see some of your friends online go through something similar to what you have with respect to being unable to organize your life, and feeling like they’re a passenger unable to drive the car. You try and warn them not to believe that a system can fix them. You know, for a fact, that many have tried before, and that it worked at first, and that there is no one thing or set of things that can make you or them functional. They don’t like that idea, or, perhaps, you’re projecting on them. They tell you it’s just a difference in how your brain and theirs work versus the rest of the world. They tell you it’s something about the dopamine or something. You don’t believe them. If it was something in the brain, someone would have found it in yours. You would have found it: it would be obvious. You stand your ground, tell them that nothing can fix them. These friends stop talking to you. You notice that you’re running on minimum three cups of coffee a day. You cut down on the sugar to lower the risk of diabetes.
You still haven’t consistently picked up drawing like you wanted to, 8 years ago. Instead, you have an unfulfilling job, 8 virtual calendars, 4 to-do lists, and no hope.
You’re twenty-four. You haven’t had a raise at your job. In fact, they’re probably going to fire you because you don’t meet their expectations. You’re not cut for company culture, or so you think. In the back of your mind, you realize that you were the perfect little guinea pig to run around in the wheel of the school system, but that you cannot accommodate to the real world. You were a lab rat. The near-constant activation of your fear response was the only thing compensating for your inability to self-direct and organize. Now, you’re out of the school system, armed with a dysfunctional reward feedback loop, a fried nervous system, and a caffeine addiction, and neither of those help someone keep a desk job.
You unearth some archives from the previous decade. You find three bullet journals. You find five planners. You find 2000 flash cards from your freshman year of uni. You find the abandoned to-do lists, and a kanban with an entire reading plan you made three years ago and forgot about. You find four failed attempts to track habits. You find two diaries. You find four sketchbooks barely a third of the way in. You find a tomato timer. You find fancy paper sheets with your last uni classes penciled in, but without the fancy marker applied.
You cry.
You forget about it over the coming days. But there is a recurring thought, at the back of your mind, that, perhaps, you could be doing the things you want in your life, if you just had a system. It always rings in your head, that sentence, every time someone comes up with a new little tool, a cute little method, an idea.
“Maybe I just need a system.”
It feels like fucking drugs to your brain, this idea, of everything neatly and perfectly organized.
There is no telling, reader, whether this fictional person reaches twenty-five. Their experience is a dramatized collage of various observations from my own life and that of so many of the people i have encountered over the years. All of us have had these experiences in common, about how we were unable to function, but somehow, unpredictably, chaotically, we could be hyper-functional, but only when fear or novelty or a challenge presented themselves in front of us.
If you recognize yourself in these lines, reader, i implore you to be gentle on yourself next time a system fails on you. In time, perhaps, you will come to find that, much like me, there is no system that can fix you.