Follow-up on filling in this year’s taxes (technically last year’s taxes) by hand rather than entering all the numbers on the PDF files via computer and Acrobat:
It is refreshing and super-helpful working with actual sheets of paper and entering numbers directly by hand onto the paper. The physical act of shuffling the papers, stacking, and sorting them makes each form more easily identifiable. Compared to the mind-numbing and exhausting chore of forcing yourself to “flip” or alt+tab between forms as documents all on one screen in one program/app and windows that — no matter how you resize them — all FEEL exactly the same, it is easier to stay awake and distinguish between forms and SEE what you have to do.
Analog tax form-filling means it takes much longer for everything to start to blur together. When you are handling tangible pieces of paper the sort of hypnosis you get standing or sitting stock still staring straight ahead at a screen (kind of like driving all night) is less likely to occur.
This year’s handwritten-taxes approach invited me to take a step I’ve never done before to clarify what lines I actually do need to fill out: I HIGHLIGHTED THE LINES I NEED TO POPULATE. Man, what an assist! I was able to go through all the forms once, referring to last year’s (err, year-before-last, to be exact), and sliiiiiiiide these delicious smooth bright neon liquid colors across the pages. Now everything is clearly indicated and I can SEE what actually needs to be done. What a boost!
I love how highlighting doesn’t just draw your attention to what you ink up; highlighting allows you to quickly assess the amount of space and data you DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT and can effectively just IGNORE. It’s an incredible accommodation to make for yourself, like crossing off 50 to 75% of the work and tasks you’d otherwise see as undone, waiting to be finished. Super-awesome ADD modification.
Having said all that, I confess I’m still struggling to finish these 2022 taxes. Once I failed to finish them late-on-time, I kept a rare social engagement I made weeks prior for day safter I thought they’d already FOR SURE be done. Knowing how I dread social engagements but actually do need to be social a couple times a year with someone other than my wife, and knowing from experience how difficult and unlikely it would be for me to REschedule (and how that would prolong and intensify the dread, also increasing the likelihood I or my friend would cancel THAT one on top of it), I told myself, “they’re already LATE-late … what difference will another day make?”
Once told myself that two days late was no worse than one day late, those two days led to three days led to deep self-loathing, fear, and a cyclone of sabotaging thoughts and behaviors.
The good news is that by writing this, I’m reminded of how much I already have done, and how much I have done to make doing the rest easier and manageable. On top of that, journaling and sharing this experience and these feelings HELPS. Like journaling always does: you dump it out, you see it more clearly, you let it go and you move on, left with more of the wheat and less of the chaff.
