So. The planner.
I got a new planner. It’s good. The layout is right, the paper feels right, my brain went oh, yes, this will work. I’ve got a whole bunch of new planner stickers. I am, objectively, very close to planner peace. I even have more sticker orders arriving this week, because apparently hope is my dominant personality trait.
And the thing is — most of what I use fits fine.
I mostly plan with icon stickers. Script stickers. Little visual cues. Those are perfect. No issues. They sit exactly where they’re meant to. They behave. They understand the assignment.
But this week I had some big things going on. Capital-B Big. The kind of things where I wanted to block out space and make it very clear, at a glance, that Shit Was Going On Here.
So I used some flags and half boxes and quarter boxes from older kits.
And those are all just ever so slightly too wide.
Not unusably so. Just enough. Enough that my eye keeps snagging on them. Enough that I now know — with horrible clarity — that most sticker kits are designed for 1.5" columns, and my planner columns are 1.25".
Which means that the one time I don’t usually plan this way — the one time I actually need big, obvious visual space — is the time everything feels wrong.
And suddenly it feels like I’ve picked the wrong planner. Like I’ve broken some arbitrary but Very Important Planner Rule that everyone else somehow knows. Like I am Doing Planning Incorrectly™, despite the fact that this system works for me 90% of the time.
Never mind that icon and script planning is how I actually function. Never mind that I don’t usually need big boxes. Never mind that stickers are meant to be tools, not tests I can fail.
My brain has latched onto this tiny mismatch and decided it is Evidence.
I know this is not actually about stickers.
It’s about wanting space to acknowledge that things are hard. Wanting a system that can hold big days as well as small ones. Wanting one area of my life to feel contained and legible when the rest of it isn’t.
Tonight that has manifested as 0.25 inches of wrongness and the feeling that I’ve somehow messed up something that was meant to help me.
I’m aware this is absurd. I’m also aware that feelings don’t care about that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
