My Passion Planner 2018
At the start of 2018, I made a resolution with myself that I would document my life day by day. Even though I kept a digital journal on my computer about my personal thoughts regarding my life, I realized that I needed to be able to keep track of myself and my thoughts when it was impossible for me to journal at other times. So, I prescribed myself to planning my days to become better organized and on course.
At the time, I was in my 5th year of graduate school, and after having flunked out of one class twice, withdrawing from a class, and being suspended for a semester, I decided that the best way to keep myself on track with school while monitoring my depressive episodes at the same time was to purchase a good planner as motivation.
It was my hopes to obtain a master’s to become a mental health counselor. Although I already had a master’s degree, that degree was in a different area and was more connected to my job. For various reasons, I was unhappy with my job, and I had been unhappy with it for a long time. I reasoned that getting another degree would help open up avenues for me to venture into something else.
One of my favorite topics of research is mental health. I had planned to focus on the areas of depressive disorders and personality disorders as a part of my graduate program. However, the one thing I had not counted on was that I would struggle immensely with each semester trying to finish the degree. I constantly battled depression even though I was taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
The crazy thing is that I completed my first master’s degree in a little less than two years. My instructors called me an indominable, overachieving force. Even then, I was going through a series of trials and errors as I tested different types of psychotropic medications trying to find the best medication to work against depression. Yet, I didn’t struggle nearly as much with grad school at that time in my life as I did during this last time.
It was mindboggling how I went from being a straight A student in one graduate program to a student flunking out in another graduate program and having to go before a review board with an essay detailing why I deserved a second chance to be reinstated back into the program. I recall feeling too depressed to feel humiliation at groveling for a place back in the program. I just wanted to finish the degree.
In fact, I had taken so many courses towards the master’s I was working towards that I had taken enough credit hours to fulfill getting a master’s in another program area. So, I did graduate with a second masters. It just wasn’t in the area that I was actually working towards. So, in an effort to get through the remainder of the program I’d chosen, I decided to embark on getting a planner to keep track of my life.
Writing is a cathartic activity for me. It relaxes me. Sometimes it’s not even about what I write but the process I go through to actually write. It takes me time to choose the right planner and the right utensils. I can actually take weeks before I will make a choice because I do research and shop around for what I want. If I don’t have the right stuff, then it defeats the purpose.
After much going back and forth, I chose the Passion Planner. It was perfect for my goals at the time. It contained a calendar, time slots for hourly management, monthly reflections, spaces for reminiscing on memories, spaces for ways to improve, and spaces to celebrate wins throughout the weeks and months. That planner became my journal on the spot, and although I didn’t use it as an actual journal, the notations I did make sufficed enough to show what I was dealing with at the time.
That planner indicated the various tasks I needed to keep up with regarding my personal, school, and professional life. It helped me to keep organized, and I felt less scattered than I would normally feel without a planner. I took that planner with me wherever I went, and overtime, I could see my progress. I managed my life. I was depressed, but writing everything down seemingly helped me to push through when I could see my goals and desires in print.
When I recently went through a planner from 2018, I was amazed regarding just how much my life was lived out in writing even though I hadn’t written nearly as much about my life in my planner as I had in my journal. Yet, I was able to gain short bursts of happenings from things that I wrote regarding events I hadn’t remembered and/or were not a focus of my journal. In fact, I laughed out loud regarding some funny comments pertaining to situations I dealt with at work, and I had emoji stickers all over the place to describe the days.
Although life was difficult, I could see how better it was for me to manage my time in writing. I had a lot going on at the time. My job was very demanding, and grad school was even more demanding. On top of those two things, I was managing relationships with people at work and outside of work, and most of the people I dealt with gave me many reasons to pause. I was surrounded by a slew of narcissistic types, and I even made short notations about them.
If I had red flags about anyone, I jotted it down. If I had questions about someone’s behavior or if I felt a certain way around someone, I wrote it all down. I even wrote down prayers, passages of scripture, poem stanzas, songs, and almost anything that came to mind. That planner just wasn’t about keeping important dates and tasks in order. It was a planner for almost everything. I even had a section where I made notes about narcissistic behavior.
My planner was filled with so many notes on narcissistic behaviors regarding three different narcissists. Those same narcissists who I had regarded as friends would be the same narcissists I would cast out of my life three years later. Specifically, I had an entire section in the back of the planner dedicated to case studies that I had completed on those frenemies’ narcissistic behaviors. In fact, I’d written in bold, capitalized print (as if I was screaming), that I was dealing with three true covert narcissists.
In reflection, I wrote more in my planner than I did in my journal during that time because I was so busy, and the planner was always on hand. Visibly seeing the craziness I was dealing with at the time regarding the three narcissists enabled me to realize that I needed to move with caution regarding each one of them. In fact, it was the beginning of a slow process of moving forward in my life without them in my life. I had so many examples of their narcissistic behaviors that I couldn’t deny what I was experiencing with each of them. The writing was not on the wall. The writing was in my planner!
In the next post, I will give you a blast from the past with a few excerpts from my planner.
My Voice Unchained 