Adjusting the sliders

 One thing I feel I am getting more comfortable with in life is the idea of balance. I have a personality that runs to extremes and that often wants to make really definite decisions that have a clear directive behind them. But that pattern usually sets me up for failure, and somehow that failure feeds the cycle so I feel I have to make an even more definite and extremely forceful decision about how to be... ad nauseum...

 So basically I have kind of gradually gotten somewhat more comfortable with the idea that a lot of things in my life are not bad. In fact they are good. But, my tendency is to take them too far and then over-react to that fact and want to go to extremes.

So, I think there are just various dimensions of my life. Which is a good thing. So I feel I am starting to get a more definite handle on the fact that like a lot of things in life are more like sliders than they are like toggle switches. So one example is buying games stuff. Che Webster over on roleplay rescue blog had a post (that I can't seem to find right now) talking about this with respect to playing vs buying rpg books. Buying games stuff is good. It is a definite action that can support both publishers and games stores. And it is fun to collect. But there is definitely a sense in my own life where sometimes the buying stuff takes over and actual reading the books or playing the games or whatever takes the back burner. So, a lot of times when I realize that, I have this desire to over react and say I will never spend another penny on games until I have absolutely gotten max value out of each and every item I own. So, I think that never works and just sort of causes me to establish these rigid parameters that I inevitably fail at following. So the solution is just to adjust the slider instead. Not to beat myself up for spending money but also recognizing that there is a pattern of overspending. So just to try to nudge the slider back into the direction of other kinds of activities...  

Another aspect that I need to work on is the time alone vs time with others slider. I am an introvert. So I enjoy spending time alone. But there is also a sense in which I use that as a justification for not doing things that would be both pleasurable and good for me. That is because they would be outside of my comfort zone. So the solution is not to force myself to go to every single club and activity regardless of how I feel. But at the same time pushing out from my comfort zone is a must because there is a definite sense that when I allow it to the general pull of my personality is to slide into just staying home endlessly and letting my world get really small. So, I just feel this is tricky because it is hard to identify sometimes when the choice is avoidance and when it is self-care.

My new life back in US seems to have a lot of these sorts of issues kind of cropping up. And now that I am on my own, I am having to make decisions about this stuff on my own. So, I think there are some things coming about like "trusting myself" and like "being gentle with myself". It is necessary to recognize that I have very limited experience living on my own so I am bound to go a little overboard in some directions and need to correct course. The trick is to not beat myself up but rather to just recognize when an adjustment is needed and then to just do my best to do it without all the extremes of setting rigid rules for myself and stuff like that.