Tiiiiiiiime is on my side, yes it is.

One of my summer experiments is attempting to swear off my watch. I’m one of those people that is hyper organized and conscious of where I’m supposed to be at what moment of every day. During the school year I am always near my planner and my Outlook calendar, constantly updating both with events from my work and personal lives. I’m trying to relax and enjoy this summer as much as possible and for me this means trying to stay relatively unscheduled and carefree. While I obviously have to plan out all my trips to here and there, the one way that I can really try and do this is by not wearing my watch.

This is not easy. I’m not sure at what age I started wearing a watch every day, but it was long enough ago that I can’t remember not being able to look at my wrist to see the time. I’ve become so dependent on it that I often freak out when I don’t know what time it is and get uneasy in places where there aren’t enough clocks (at least by my standards). I used to have cheap watches because I was so hard on them; constantly banging them against things and such. I spent so much money replacing them every few months that I decided to invest in something a bit more sturdy, and it’s been well worth it. Every few years I get a new one just because I find something very fun that I like – but every one that I own (once its battery has been replaced) still works, including one that had to be revived by a very nice jewelry store man who could see the absolute pain on my face when he couldn’t get it started again.

At first not having the watch was weird. I was constantly looking at my cell phone to see what time it was, searching out clocks in public places, etc. More quickly than I imagined, I started liking the feeling of having nothing on my wrist. I finally had to do a semi-professional event a few weeks ago and put it back on, thinking that if nothing else it might help jumpstart me back into the feeling of working, if only for a day. I was surprised to find that I didn’t like the feeling of it anymore – I didn’t like the grip of it on my wrist, didn’t like feeling its weight on my arm. I was glad to take it off at the end of the day and return to my summer world where time doesn’t matter….much.

Deep down I know that this doesn’t mean I’ll never put one on again. I think it’s sort of like having to wear “real shoes” with socks for the first time when it starts getting cold again – you hate the feeling of it and you feel suffocated at first, but it just feels right after the first few times. My crazy organized self will return when needed, but for now she’s been safely repressed to the deep corners of my brain.