making my bed makes me a better person

I recently graduated from college and founded a company with my best friends. Before that, I was the kind of person who always criticized my parents because they did nothing after their 9-5. They watched television. I always told myself that I would be different, be more active, more social, and more intellectual. Well, ten years have passed, and the moment I was left without an assignment or an exam to worry over, I became my parents.

Having free time can be scary for me because I've always been a type A person. Prone to getting anxious, achievement-obsessed, task-oriented, and feeling an urgency to get stuff done. That's why when a plan is laid in front of me, it is much easier for me to relax.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, when I had the ultimate autonomy of my time, I gradually felt like I had no time to do anything. Stepping into this ambiguous abyss we call real life, I tried to "go with the flow" to achieve my personal goals and feel fulfilled with my life, but I ended up doom-scrolling every day after work, only to wake up the next day and repeat.

Look, I am my own boss. I decide when I work and when I don't. Which I know to be a great blessing to have. But having this chance to control the entirety of my time has made me understand that I am devastatingly bad at time management.

I also know that I like to be overdramatic and my life may be perfectly fine for some people, but not feeling like I am in control of my life makes me feel unfulfilled and I've been looking for an answer for sime time. I tried scheduling my entire life on Google calendars, bucket-lists, journaling, to-do lists, and the most popular stuff you can find with a quick internet search about productivity. They worked for some time until they didn't. Lacking a greater force to audit my actions, eventually got me to slack off.

So I gave up trying, thinking this is what adult life is. Then I read a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther, where Goethe says most of the people are afraid of the little free time they have, so much so they would do everything to get rid of it. That made me think about my perception of my free time. Why do I want to minimize it? What is the thing I hope to gain in the process? Uncertainty of the answer to this question has been the basis of a mountain of thoughts that have been bugging me for some time. This obscurity made me realize I have been trying to hammer my problems when I should be trying to fix them cleverly. Not knowing what the problem was was the reason for my struggle.

This was a good progress on my behalf, but I ended up not thinking about it, swept away by daily struggles. However, one day I decided to make my bed and leave the house in a proper fashion every morning. It's not time consuming nor challenging, but I never had the tendency to make my bed since I started to live alone. But in the journey of trying to fix the void I've been feeling I decided to give this a shot.

Every time I made my bed before I left the house, I felt this weird satisfaction. The feeling that I am in control. I wanted to do something, and then did it. This tiny act of showing up for what I planned made me realize I knew the answer all along.

Order. I want order and intention. I want things to be, because I wanted them to be. I figured I am more rested when I decided to just lie in bed and watch TV, and do so, compared to just not knowing what to do and do the same. I had the false idea that I need to fill any free time I have with stuff to do, or else I wasn't actually participating in life the way I wanted to. But I was wrong. As long as the decision is mine, it does not matter what I did. I finally felt content as I revealed the core of the issue that's been messing with me for months. Moving forward, I probably will not continue to make my bed, but I gained a framework to work with to continue my life with less mental disturbance.