Scheduling Blues

Why does it seem as though the mind can control so much through scheduling and yet seemingly control so little?

I thought of this question at just this moment. One of the attributes in my personality is the tendency in me to want to schedule events and occurrences as much as I possibly can. While certain advantages do occur as a result of this system, such as the fact that I tend to finish work on time, that it’s easy for me to meet deadlines, and that there is a certain sense of calmness that washes over me because I have a foreknowledge of the events that will happen and can plan for them accordingly, something which is helpful for my self, which has Asperger’s coexisting with OCD, there are also disadvantages to the system of scheduling I have.

For starters, the constant scheduling which I engage in imposes a rigidity that makes it very difficult for me to change course who a schedule is changed. As much as I have improved with regards to scheduling, I still become quite upset at a change of schedule, for the reason that the plans which I carefully laid in my mind became tossed aside so quickly. This thought distresses me, and that, plus the fact that I now have to retool my mind to take into account the change in the schedule, means that there is a process of sorts which I have to take in order to deal with schedule changes.

First and foremost, I have to process the change made to the schedule. I have to recognize the fact that the schedule and the chain of events which I had palled would not happen. Once this happens, I become saddened, both at myself and at the person who made the change. This leads to a sense of anger and sadness washing over me. In this state, I release the pent-up emotions which become evident due to the feeling of betrayal that resulted from the change. After some time, once most of the emotions have been released, whether through crying, thought, or other mechanisms, comes the third step. Here, I have to disassociate myself from the events that did not happen and prepare myself to try and move on from the problems which occurred. Depending on the feeling I have, and how strong it is, this process can either be relatively short, or could carry on, such as my reaction to the early departure of a friend of mine one Saturday when we met. I tried to bade him farewell, and he left, but I could tell that he wasn’t completely convinced. To be honest, I wasn’t either.

I tried getting over the events which occurred, but instead, the many thoughts continued raging in my mind. Two days later, on Monday, those thoughts prevented my sleep and led me to awaken early. I went on a walk early in the morning to try and release the pent-up emotions I had. When I returned, wet from the droplets of rain that fell from the dark sky, I went to my mother and told her what I felt.

I then cried and cried and wailed about myself, about him, and about all the sets of things in my personality which I felt contributed to the chain of events. The crying continued to last for quite a while until it subsided. I drank some tea, calmed myself down, and ultimately went to sleep, as I was still tired from getting so little sleep.

In the end, I awakened and saw my psychologist, and while the emotions did fade away, the process took a day to get by.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this chain of events has happened to me before. Ever since I was young, I tried to schedule everything. In spite of me being told to be more flexible, actually becoming so proved something which wasn’t easy for me to engage in.

Periodically, events would come that I would get excited for, and then schedule for them, and ultimately wind up disappointed because the event I wanted to did not occur.

For example, I was told that my mother was going with her boyfriend to the Florida Keys. I really enjoy going to them, and excitedly scheduled myself for the trip. However, at the last minute, the trip wound up not happening. Disappointment washed over me and my mom tried to calm me down, but it didn’t completely work. I tried to become less optimistic and more pessimistic, assuming events wouldn’t happen in order to avoid getting excited over things.

Has that worked? I’d say it’s been a mixed bag.

While I have improved somewhat with regards to scheduling, it still remains a major problem, something that is hard for me to deal with, and something that while seemingly making my life easier, it makes my life harder.

I schedule a lot of things, but I most strictly schedule myself. When I awake, I must do my bed, use the restroom, wash my face, head downstairs, eat breakfast, go back upstairs to the bathroom, brush my teeth, and proceed upon the set of events which I mentally scheduled for the day. This makes matters predictable, but makes it very hard to accept variants. Occasionally, I might avoid doing my bed, but I almost always do so.

Scheduling is my double-edged sword; there are some benefits I gain from it, but there’s also quite a lot of disadvantages to it. I’ve been trying to move away from it, since it negatively affects myself and the people around me, as people view me as being a bad person even though I don’t intend to do anything that injures the person, and it also harms me because it leads to a stiffening rigidity.

I doubt that scheduling will ever completely go away, even if it makes it hard for me to relax. My OCD means that I will want to have order and structure to things that occur. However, I do need to become less rigid, both for my own self, and for the sake of others.

I’ve already, over the course of several years, become less rigid, even if it’s hard to believe.

Hopefully, I will become even less rigid.

Scheduling isn’t a bad thing; in fact, I think it’s generally helpful, but the challenge comes not in the aspect of scheduling, but in reducing my own rigidity, which leads me to take schedules as an inerrant guide which I must follow.

Ultimately, I’ll close this with a quote of my own.

“Scheduling is not an end in and of itself, but rather, a means to an end, which helps to make events easier to manage and run, but which cannot be taken to be something which must be followed. Schedules cannot serve as rigid blocks that must be followed and which make the person inflexible to change. Instead, schedules must have the flexibility to be adaptable to almost any circumstance. Most importantly, however, the scheduler must also realize that schedules do not define his life, as hard as that might seem.”

That is the lesson that I hope to learn.