i don't water my own garden enough

on self-care

a photo i took walking through yoyogi park in tokyo

i don’t water my own garden enough.

i don’t nurture my body in the way i need to.

i envy the habits (not the aesthetic) of a stereotypical bland white girl who is neck deep into the clean girl aesthetic or your regular degular los angeles instagram influencer who has perfect skin and a perfectly timed morning routine...the kind of girl who sticks to her to-do lists religiously…meal preps every sunday...plans outfits the night before…and somehow has both a five-year plan and quarterly goals she actually follows through on.

essentially...the girls that are the textbook definition of an a-type personality.

that is not me.

in a lot of ways...i am the antithesis of that. what i’ve realized in my 27 years on this earth is that i’m very left-brained in my thoughts and in the way i go about my life. i move at my own pace (sometimes to a fault)...i can lose hours to getting ready due to getting caught up perfecting my eyeliner or obsessively curating the exact playlist vibe...i leave half-finished mugs of tea all over my room...i struggle with punctuality (though i am working on it)...i forget to reply to texts for days (again…working on it)...i’ve recently been struggling with adult acne…and i often find myself deep-diving random obsessions instead of doing the things i actually need to do.

i have my moments where i’ll try to tap into this a-type version of myself…lock in for a week or two…get everything in order…before i inevitably burn out and lose momentum. and then i find myself back at square one.

over the years, i’ve come across so many articles about how creative people are often wildly unorganized (examples here…and here…and here…and here…the list goes on). and honestly, that idea has brought me a lot of comfort. like “ahhh…how lovely it is to share this particular flaw with the creative geniuses of the world.”

i do love that sentiment. but then…just a few weeks ago, i bought the cutest cat-eye glasses from hidden treasures (insane thrift store in topanga) and now they’re lost somewhere in my room. i can’t find them anywhere. and while i know this is the most first-world, inconsequential problem…it’s moments like this where i can’t help but think: if i had the kind of brain where organization came naturally, this wouldn’t be happening. i’d know exactly where they were…because i wouldn’t have misplaced them in the first place.

it’s in these small moments that i realize just how much time and energy i lose to my own scattered tendencies. how much of my life is spent retracing steps, reopening the same tabs, and starting shit over. not because i’m incapable, but because i didn’t write something down or forgot where i saved it.

sometimes i wonder if deep down there is a version of me who drinks water first thing in the morning, color-codes her calendar, and actually sticks to a routine. and i do think she’s in there somewhere…but more often than not, my adhd tendencies hijack any semblance of structure before it can take root. the thought is there. the want is there. but the follow-through tends to get tangled in the chaos.

i don’t feel like i’m lesser because i’m more disorganized…some of my best creative ideas have come from my brain moving a million miles an hour. but i do catch myself romanticizing what it might feel like to move through life with a little more order and a little less friction.

but at the end of the day, everyone has their thing. no one moves through life perfectly. and (for all i know) the a-type girl bosses i envy could be looking at me…wishing they had some quality i take for granted.

i don’t say all of this to encourage being complicit. i’m not stagnant or a prisoner to the things that i’d like to change about myself, and there is no denying that i have a bright future of stints where i will pick myself up and try to tap into that “a-type” persona ahead of me…but i could be a little more gentle when comparing and contrasting the qualities that make me me with other people’s idea of having their shit together.

with that said…maybe i’ll never be the girl taking tumeric/ginger shots with an organized inbox…but i can still learn and work towards not staying stuck in my ways and keep picking myself up…and continuing to work on watering my own garden.

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