I'm horrendously disorganised. I am, and sometimes it's so bad it's embarrassing. So here's what I've tried to do. I've tried to cover it up by being organised.
This struck me as a weird paradox today - how you can deal with a characteristic trait by applying its own solution. Let me explain.
"Matt, how can you say you're not organised? Whenever I see you, you're always making spreadsheets and checklists and doing stuff that looks pretty organised to me!"
Well yes, made-up imaginary person, you're kind of right. I do do those things, but only because I have to, in order to cover up my terrible inbuilt hard-wired tendency to leave everything until the last minute, panic and then call in everyone I can think of who can fix it while my hair turns grey with the stress. Every disorganised person knows that's bad... and so do their friends.
I'm similarly tidy/untidy too. How does that work? My natural inclination is to spread my stuff everywhere as though I'm slowly invading the world with piles of paper. I hate this, so I fight my nature continually by putting things away, finding a place for things and not letting it get into a pickle. So am I tidy (x) or untidy (-x)? I genuinely don't know. I suspect over time, you get to be whatever you choose to be.
The concert went really well. I don't think I've ever been quite so chuffed at the choir's performance or the level of enjoyment they displayed tonight. I watched them from behind the piano, thanking God that he allowed me to do this two years ago. Out of the ashes of my own disappointment, he managed to put together something so beautiful and so hopeful that it's enough to make your very heart sing. It's fascinating to me how nothing else I've ever been involved in has carried the same kind of buzz for this length of time. Running a choir might have been one of the best decisions I ever made. That and moisturiser.
Oh! That's exactly it! The x=-x paradox! When I got in, I put on moisturising cream because my face has been falling apart today, flaking off like old wallpaper. I wouldn't normally slap it on, but then my skin isn't normally this crumbly. So now it isn't - I have applied the solution because of my problem and now I'm simultaneously smooth-faced and yet still eroded. Perhaps this applies to lots of areas - I'm not a very good musician so I practiced and pretended that I was; I blagged my way into technical writing, claiming to be able to 'express complex ideas in a clear and simple way' when I still didn't fully understand just how complex those ideas were going to be. Eventually, you kind of become the thing you set out to be.
Maybe it's OK to live in the paradox, to whack on the moisturiser or bash out those I, IV and V chords. Maybe it's OK to pretend to be an adult, a father, a mother, a whatever. I guess you really can choose what you want to be.
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