By way of my brother, by way of fellow blogger Lisa, I bought Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher. I was intrigued by the subtitle "A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything that You Love." That would be quite the accomplisment because there is A LOT that I love. If I made a list of current hobbies and interests, along with what I want to persue but just haven't had the time, it would be so long that it would just depress me because I think there's no way I can do all that!
So, I may be a scanner. I fit her descriptions, some of them any way, especially the ones about wanting to do so many things that I don't do anything and once the discovery is over, I'm not interested and I move on. And I've always felt like there was something wrong with me and that I was inferior because of it. One time when I was telling my husband about one of my latest "maybe I should try" things, he was quiet and nonresponsive. When I asked him why he told me it's because I don't finish anything I start, so he doesn't have an opinion. Now, this was a long time ago. He's learned that being that honest with me is not a good idea.
But I thought he was right. And the result was two-fold: 1)I stopped thinking about all the different things I could do and 2) I stopped confiding in my husband what I was thinking and dreaming. (This is where everyone goes, "Oooohhhhh. That's sad.")
But after a while I realized, who was I kidding? I couldn't stop going in different directions and I couldn't stop telling my hubby about it. After all, why the hell did I marry him if I couldn't ramble on about nothing to him.
So, now here's a book saying that I'm a scanner and that it's OK. And it's possible to use it to my advantage. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, only about 40 pages, but I'm going to read the whole thing. Even though my pattern is to skim and jump around to the stuff that's interesting to me then put it away, never to think about it again. Yet another symptom of a scanner--all gung ho and excited to get started then lose interest when something else comes along.
Anyway, let's see how this goes. Then I'll pass it along to other scanners I know because I'll be knee-deep in some other project.
2 comments:
Kell, I'm excited to hear that you found something useful to you in this book! I haven't read mine yet, but now I'm looking forward to it just a bit more.
One of the things she suggests is having a journal, but she calls it a Daybook. This seems to be a theme in self-help books! I've slowed down on the morning pages I was doing, but may combine them with this project. This journal sounds like more fun, actually.
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