Gonna make a change
For once in my life
It’s gonna feel real good
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right
–Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror”

The problem is, I bought into my own myth.

I have been slugging along accomplishing—DOING—for so long that I began to believe the tales of my own legendary productivity. Apparently, somewhere, there was a campfire around which people sat and spun yarns in hushed tones of Jer Lance, indefatigable doer of things and achiever of objectives. Far and wide, these stories spread, so when things needed doing, I would get an email in my inbox or a mention at a party…just this little thing that needs doing. “Email it to me and I’ll look into it,” I would say; and I would. All of them. Every single one.

Now, it just so happens that I am fairly well connected. I am not sure how it happened, but after a few short years around Michigan fandom, I hang out with or communicate with the people who make so many of the local (and to a lesser degree, non-local) conventions and events happen that I tend to have a pretty good informal relationship with them. As a result, I have a pretty effective track record of finding a solution to those ‘little things that need doing’ that get brought to me, so the legend grows.

And it is entirely my fault, because—as I started this out by stating—I bought into my own myth. I came to genuinely believe that I could survive endlessly on 4 hours of sleep and no actual breaks. I have been under the illusion that using my relaxation time as time to pretend to relax while secretly working would actually fool my body and my mind into thinking that I’ve really been socializing when I have been doing anything but. I legitimately convinced myself that running an audio broadcast at a party was the same thing as socially hanging out at a party. In the universe of people who have hugely sold themselves a bill of goods, I am a hall of famer, and it has exhausted me. I am now just fundamentally incapable of being that guy. I have finally hit that wall, a wall that I have been warned about time and again but never truly believed I could hit—I am a fucking legend, remember? My response time is getting slower. Things are slipping by. I am taking on less and less, but still not able to accomplish it. My legendary 4 hours of sleep has stretched to 6, and I’m still left waking each morning feeling entirely unawake. My relentless productivity is flagging and my mythical 16-hour, full-court-press attacks on mounds of work have softened to 2 hour micro-bursts interrupted by thirty minutes of staring like a zombie into space trying to muster a combination of will-power and coherent thought.

I am failing. I am failing you guys and I am failing me. Worse, I am failing and beating myself up about it considerably; nobody has been as hard on me about this as I have been. I am working harder than ever and getting far less done. I am genuinely upset with my body for needing so much sleep. I get so frustrated I want to cry when I can only find the creativity and ability to write so rarely that I am almost never at a keyboard when it happens; so much is left unwritten. I want to punch things when my mind doesn’t have the acumen to make the sharp, decisive leaps that it was capable of a year ago. I am so unbelievably angry with myself for not having enough will power to just FORCE MYSELF to work my way through my to-do list. This is who I am, why can I not be that person now? Last night, while trying to get some of the massive pile of work I had before me completed, I was forced by my body to lie down on a couch at a friend’s house in the middle of a crowd of people and take a brief (oh, oh so very brief it felt) nap. I woke, and still was so wiped that I could get nothing done. I was near tears for the hour I spent dropping my son off at his mother’s place because of the frustration, the tiredness, the soreness, and the hopelessness of not being able to do what it is that I do.

It is taking a toll on my health, too. I am eating healthier than ever, but my body is falling apart. I am getting random nose bleeds. I have gotten even fatter despite a healthier diet and cutting out most fast food. The persistent headache that has gone on almost entirely uninterrupted for a couple of years now has now become stronger and added to its repetoire the combination of occasional spots in my vision and waves of nausea. I am cranky. I am frustrated when I have to explain what I need from people more than once. My low-grade level of dickishness has turned into full-on assholery when dealing with the people that frustrate me. My tolerance for ineptitude has waned to near non-existant levels.

I am not even me, anymore…I am some critically exhausted, pathetic simulacrum of me. And when I say exhausted, I am not talking about the standard ‘I am in need of a night of uninterrupted sleep or a weekend off’ I keep talking about. No, I am ‘I need to make functional life changes before I collapse in on myself like an imploding star, with all of the requisite fireworks that coincide with such an event.’ So I need to make some kind of change. Last night, Ger and I discussed exactly what that change is going to have to be.

I need to stop taking on the little shit. As I evaluated where my time goes, that was the big thing that stuck out…none of the hats that I wear are specifically time consuming. Work, School, Penguicon 2010, Penguicon 2011, ConFusion 2011, and AASFA are all relatively time-light. They each have their moments, but those moments rarely flare up all at once. No, what beats me down is the steady flow of ‘little things that need doing’, both externally and internally. So I need to divide all of my tasks into things that will remain, things that I am quashing or delaying indefinitely, things I will add, and things that I haven’t really decided about yet. To that end:

So there we are. Hopefully, this will help…I know sharing it has helped lift a load from my chest that I’ve been carrying for quite a while now in relative silence (or, at least, as much silence as I have ever been capable of), so by that measure, it is already a success. Thankfully, my wife has agreed to be my gatekeeper on new tasks, by which I basically mean that when I think about taking on a new task, she has undertaken the job of saying “No!” or to forward me a link back to this so that I can avoid being stupid. This is going to be a good thing. It is going to make me happier, more productive, and hopefully healthier…

…but I still want to be super-me again. :(