Pronoun Trouble

Man, I hate underlying psychological issues that just keep coming up.

This keeps creating problems in my life, and I have got to figure out how to get over it. It's like... a pathological avoidance issue, and I *recognize it* and why isn't that enough to make it *stop*?

Basically... if I get behind on something, or leave something undone, or am unable (for whatever reason) to do something for long enough, I get so embarrassed/feel so ashamed for not having dealt with it *already*, that I become increasingly unable to do it... even as the original issue just snowballs into worse.

A big one that's finally mostly been sorted out was my dental stuff. A decade+ stretch of no insurance that meant no professional dental care, overlapping with several years living in my car that meant very little routine personal dental care... and my teeth were fucked. Years later, when I finally did get dental insurance through my job, I felt too guilty about how long it had been, and too scared of how bad it might actually be, so I just... kept not getting care. Years later, I finally went in... and yeah, I needed a lot of fillings. Somehow I had avoided needing anything more drastic than fillings, though if I'd put it off longer, it would only have gotten worse. If I'd taken care of it years before, when insurance was first available to me, it could have been far less bad.

In the past, this is how I had medical bills from an ER visit sent to collections. I was so embarrassed that I couldn't pay, because I wasn't insured, and was living in my car, that... I just kept ignoring it, never even tried to get on a payment plan of any kind, and just let it go to collections and fuck my credit permanently.

A current one is the truck. Vehicle stuff makes me inordinately anxious, typically due to cost. So many times, when something has gone wrong enough to need fixing, it's been so expensive that we can't afford it, or can barely do so. Preventive maintenance then gets trapped in the same anxiety of "what if they find something else wrong?"
I've been smelling a coolant leak for a couple of months, and have just... not done anything about it. I finally asked a coworker and his neighbor (both of them car guys) to take a look at it, and despite really wanting to put it off until after the holidays (because I love having a justification to put the dreaded thing off), we set up a time, and they looked at it on Monday. There is a crack all along the radiator, and it is *hemorrhaging* coolant all over basically everything under the hood. More worryingly, the truck was basically entirely out of oil, which was damn close to being catastrophic, and not even something I'd been even slightly concerned over. (And my coworker was very nice when I told him that I was embarrassed, but also gave me The Look about not taking the care that I should.)
[This does frustrate me mildly, because I do almost literally no driving, and just sort of leave it to Alex to keep an eye on things like that, but I need to be checking it myself.]
We need to replace the radiator (plus unrelatedly, it needs the pump for the windshield wiper fluid replaced.) They'll order the parts, give us a break on the labor, and get the work done as soon as possible. They also want to ultimately give the transmission a flush, as well as replacing the differential fluid. (Which it should get - we're over 200k miles at this point.) The same work would likely have been needed if I'd gotten it looked at right away, but putting it off only made it worse, and meant that the oil got that much closer to being catastrophic. We'll be able to afford what needs doing, but it was *so close* to being something that would have been disastrous.

The same thing happens about much lower-stakes issues, too:

Last year, I had taken so long to get some editing work done for a friend, that I just... kept not working on it, not talking to her, and stewing in my guilt over it for months.

One I vaguely mentioned a month or so ago: looking at things like... books I want to read. There are a lot of classics that I want to read, like Tolkien and Le Guin, but because *I feel guilty that I haven't read them yet*, I've put off reading them *at all.*

Basically, this is a STUPID pattern, and I wish that knowing it was stupid was enough to make it STOP.

I'm trying to make sure that I push through when I recognize it happening, and so far the most major disasters have been avoided. Eventually taking the plunge to deal with the thing has almost always been significantly less bad than the knots I tie myself in for weeks/months/years beforehand, AND YET.

It sucks and I hate it.

I've been feeling more strongly about trying to get reading done than I have been getting writing done lately, while also staring in dismay at how long that TBR list is growing. (The more books I read, the more I end up hearing about, and the more I end up wanting to read. Somehow.)

One of the things I've been considering as I look back at my reading for this year is... I think I need to be a bit meaner on my rating scale, haha.

And I think "mean" is the wrong word: but it feels "mean" when I give anything under a 4 out of 5. As such, I've given way more 4s than any other rating, even when a handful of those were books that I really did end up feeling fairly neutrally toward, which really should be more of a 3. At least a few of the things that I have given 3s to really should be 2s, because in some cases I have remained salty about how much I didn't like it, haha. Even a few of the 5s should probably more properly be 4s, but because they were better than some of the should-have-been-3s, their ratings got nudged up. Basically, the whole scale is out of whack.

Tumblr user "aromanticduck" shared the following chart to explain how they give ratings:



"Spicy" on the chart indicates that the work inspires some strong feelings, where "bland" indicates that it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression. (I quoted this chart a couple months ago, recalling the spicy vs. bland 3s, but have now actually found the original.)

I really like this chart!

As they explain in their reasoning, this makes 5s and 1s both fairly difficult to achieve, because there's only one way to get there. 3s are easiest to get on the chart, and would theoretically be the most common rating.

Now, I don't think that a 3 necessarily has to be the average rating that I'm giving. I am curating my reading list, and minus a handful of wildcards, I am trying to read things that I expect to enjoy. It would make sense for 4s to be pretty common, if the things I think will appeal to me actually do so! Even so, I know that in some cases I've been giving 4s because I really liked something, and sometimes the 4s mean that it was just... fine.

(Of course, blah blah, I always reserve the right to add in my subjective feelings. Like... Maeve Fly was a 2.5 for me, because I don't like the subgenre. For someone who likes that subgenre better, it could be an easy 5! I thought the writing and character work was great; I just didn't like it. It was subjectively wrong for me, which is not objectively saying "there were too many things wrong with this". Vice versa, there are things that could be an objective 3, but I had such a great time, I'm going to give it higher.)

I think I'm going to go back through my reviews from this year and try to reassess some of them, really trying to keep the chart in mind, because I want to be able to look back at things and see a fairly accurate view of what I liked or didn't.

I really do have to get over feeling like giving a 3 is mean, though. Even when I like the author, even when there were good points to the book, even when it's part of a series I enjoy...

(I think I've been poisoned by the way star ratings work for businesses, where basically anything under a perfect 5 gets some employee yelled at, and a 3 can get you shut down...)