unreclaimable

One of the lies I've not realized I was believing - but which I picked up from every school I've attended - is that time is never really lost.

Perhaps it was a late paper I could turn in for no penalty.
Perhaps it was the all-nighter I used in place of daily diligence, daily study, and daily review.
Or perhaps it was the right mix of compassion and charm.

Regardless - I learned that time is a resource; much like sleep, I gained awareness that time could be shuffled, re-distributed, re-assigned.  And I valued this because my day was filled with events - many of which were things I thought were important, or that I could not cancel, or that simply took away from time I'd have preferred to spend on other things.

My solution was to sacrifice sleep, quality, and memory.

I didn't mind the sleep sacrifice - at first it was hard, but with sufficient allocation of caffeine and sugar, sleep seems like a simple manageable resource.  It creates the illusion that lack of timely sleep is reconcilable; and so I became a sleep bank expert - and lost the ability to recognize when I truly needed sleep and when, instead, I was just weary.  But the ongoing sacrifice of sleep gradually diminishes your ability to recognize the damage it does.  Kind of like an addiction.


Which led to not minding the quality sacrifice - initially it is painful to admin (if ever) that performing at a diminished capacity is horrible.  If you do it long enough, you migrate from a desire to perform well to a kind of pride that "your quality didn't diminish even though you didn't get enough sleep."  This was also an illusion - the illusion that lack of timely sleep has no true impact on quality; and so I became an expert on the appearance of quality - and lost the ability to genuinely identify my own quality while it was being generated.  I can still submit and create value and earnest worth; however, I stop sooner, develop less depth, and have a shorter-quality-attention-span than I had known myself to possess.


When these both were in place I realized I'd been experiencing diminished short-term memory; short-term memory loss is sneaky because, when you really have it, you don't remember you have it.  You'll note that your ability to recall things is "generally" diminished - but without some kind of intentional evaluation, you'll ignore and perhaps completely disregard the fact you no longer store things as easily as you had in times past.  If you were good with names, that can easily go; if you were good with sounds/songs, then your recall might be only things that were roughly when you started losing the memory.  In all cases, the true impact is scary.  How much of who we are is our memory of ourselves?

Time is not reclaimable.
Don't waste it.
And get some sleep!