Tonight I’ve been pulling apart my office and going through boxes and boxes, of piles and piles, of papers and miscellaneous STUFF. “Stuff” has ranged from important papers to old receipts, to about 15 months of bank statements, to paystubs from clients, to recipes, to souvenirs and random objects. CDRs, things to file, paperclips, paint chips and business cards. All things I’ve neglected to deal with, shuffled first into stacks, then cascading piles, then dumped into boxes.

I guess what I’m realizing is that, while the internet represented a definite means of escaping the not-so-great aspects of my life, my work… I was escaping a lot more than I thought. I wasn’t just avoiding work projects I didn’t want to work on, I was avoiding the problems in my marriage, how messy my office was, how little I felt like dealing with life in general. TAFL Boards were better than working on clearing the backlog. Fanlistings were better than filing papers. Reloading my Gmail was much, much better than facing my problems.

In the past few days I’ve realized a lot — just how much I’m learning for the very first time, for instance — and tonight I realized that I’ve never learned to put things away or organize much of anything. Worse, I’ve never learned to deal with problems, even when they’re difficult or unpleasant. I avoid things, I escape things, I hope they’ll go away if I ignore them. I’m turning 30 in September, and I’m only now starting to learn one of the most fundamental skills in life — how to deal with problems.