Avoidance Advent, an ode

Why giving myself homework during the busiest time of year is healing me

Last week, (well, exactly beginning December 1), I started posting little squares of construction paper bearing handwritten tasks to my Instagram Stories. I referred to it as procrastination advent and immediately you good people were in my DMs prancing around all Jack Skellington with your What’s this? What’s this?

Some of you wanted to know the details so you could do it yourself. This immediately marked you to me as a fellow traveler, you little sicko, by which I mean: a neurodivergent person, probably a parent, definitely someone who has at least one job, and someone who carries around some shame regarding your capacity and executive function.

Many of you were like, “Why would you choose December, ten pounds of month in a five-pound sack, to do this? Good for you, but not for me.” To that I say, yeah, I probably should have thought of that before I committed to this and started sharing it publicly!! But also, the idea is that the year-end itself is the hard deadline that so many of us need in order to get our brains to stand up straight and pay attention. And importantly, the idea is not mine so let me give credit:

I got this from Margaret of Bad Art Every Day. There is a guide you can buy and there is a structure that she has created to make this manageable, social, and tidy. I did not really contend deeply with that part of it because just her words, “Avoidance Advent,” served as a jet pack to the moon for me.

Here’s how it began for me. We were on vacation in Mexico over Thanksgiving and I was enjoying the fake life of limited choices. I didn’t conceive, plan, or execute meals. Every day we could decide in which order we would: go to the pool, go to the beach, go to dinner, go for walks, go back to the room for screens and games, and go to bed. We could only wear the clothes that were packed, and every morning we’d come back from breakfast and our horrible humanness would be erased from the room and replaced with clean, starched bedding and toiletries arranged in a line on the sink.

Now, eventually this Truman Show existence wears out its welcome and one’s thoughts turn to the charms of regular, ugly life and its expansiveness. Unfortunately, the entry to my regular life is almost always blocked by the clutter of what is also my regular life: unending multi-step tasks that need to be accomplished during working hours, unexpected illness, spirit days at school, changes to insurance, broken appliances, etc etc etc, not to mention actual, literal clutter.

Nick’s job as a professor means his approach to this part of our life is different than mine. For the 15 weeks of the semester, he drops himself into a well of work and getting our family through the immediate needs of the day. Then, with the weeks and months between semesters, he will reemerge as someone available for The List, an imagined and constantly shifting roster of administrative shit nipping at our heels until we die, and which exists only in my mind.

This is useful in its way, but I personally can’t hide from The List. I am The List after all, The List is really my magnum opus when you consider the time I spend with it. There is no daylight between me and The List, I was borne from the The List and to The List I shall return. There is an angle here about politics of the family and the mental load carried unequally by women, but shh, I can’t zoom out on that right now. I’m out here trying to figure out how to either do things or not do things without attaching so much meaning to it.

Avoidance Advent, somehow, is helping me get there. On the plane home, I easily produced a list of 24 tasks (I could produce 100 without coming up for air, but I only needed 24.) When I got home, I wrote all the tasks down on construction paper notes, taped them shut, and randomly ordered them 1-24. My 6-year-old wanted to help and made a full tree for it; each task removed reveals a hand-drawn ornament. A thing of beauty.

Jane: So what did you write on the cards? Christmas traditions?
Me, sheepish: Oh, it’s actually…uh, it’s chores I need to do.

Jane in her glory

Then I almost gave up the first day.

Here is what I did to myself. It was impossible to draft a set of tasks that were balanced in effort but some of them were really 5 tasks in one. This folly became immediately evident.

Monday, December 1. A MONDAY, first of all, Nick’s and my first day back at work after a week off, the kids first day back at school after a week off, a day where we had committed to attending a community meal for dinner downtown, and a day that I had promised the kids we could both decorate the tree and make cookies. The community meal I was fine to keep because it deleted cooking and dishes from the equation. The tree decorating and cookies piece could not rightly be delayed because we had already delayed it all weekend. Oh, and Jane needed to go to bed early because she was having SURGERY the following morning, a thing Nick and I had to prep for as well.

And it was the day I pulled my first task: “Fix broken tile and recaulk bathtub.” ?????

These were things that at 8 a.m. that Monday I had never attempted before and didn’t have the materials to do. It also is like, a multi-hour job. I didn’t want to fail at my first thing, so I went to the hardware store over my lunch, stole 15 minutes here and there from my workday ripping out caulk and…didn’t finish it. Obviously. We did decorate the tree though, and we even made cookies.

But I was able to finish the next day! I had taken the day off for Jane’s surgery anyway. While she was rolling on kid percocet and mainlining Unicorn Academy, I got the tub looking…not professionally recaulked, but at least no longer moldy. The task I pulled for December 2 had me sending an email, which took 15 seconds.

I wasn’t behind, and I hadn’t even failed. I had gotten the thing done that I had been looking at in disgust every time I sat down on the toilet in that bathroom for the last two years.

I have made thousands of lists over the years, in order to draw out The List from my brain, and it has only sort of helped. Writing out The List, I still see all the items at a glance, crowded together in their masses, ganging up on me. “My name is Legion for we are many,” they say, because they are from the devil. I only tick off the ones that don’t scare me, constantly renegotiating and reordering the list, leaving the worst ones for the end, or really for never.

The List still exists but I’ve weakened it. I don’t remember exactly what is on the advent calendar, but sometimes one of the items will pop into my head. I’ll immediately put the thought to bed because one day TBD this month it will come due, but it’s not today. I don’t need to make a plan for it.

When other things (I told you, there are hundreds) fly into my head, I can just shrug and say, that’s not part of what I’m doing this month. I already picked my tasks. Too bad so sad. My stunt life of limited choices does not permit it.

There was a TikTok thing, I think, about hyping yourself up by reminding yourself (you being any commoner regardless of parental status or job sector) that doing what you have to do in a day would put Kendall Jenner in a coma.

I started this with the intention of bullying myself into being better, a tack that has never worked. It has made me realize that I already do a lot, so no wonder it’s hard to also do all the stuff that hangs out in the margins of my mind, exhaling smoke into my face as I pass by. I can usually do one small extra thing though. And I think I deserve a Pepsi for that.

Gotta have it

yr mate,
Evie
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