I have a tendency to run a little behind schedule. I hate being late. I feel awful when I’m late. In principle, I agree with the adage, If you’re early, you’re on time, and if you’re on time, you’re late, yet it’s something that I have never been able to live by. I am usually a few minutes late wherever I go, or at least barely on time.
Nearly every day of high school I would pull my car into the parking lot with only a few minutes to spare before the first bell rang. I would often make it into class as the bell was ringing, when I did make it, much to the amusement of my already-seated friends. One of them once joked about nominating me for the senior superlative Most Likely to Be Late for their Own Wedding, much to the incredulity of the people around her at the time.
See, the thing is, people don’t expect me to be a person who has a problem with running late. I’m a studious, rule-following perfectionist, and I think I come across that way; as someone who cares deeply about getting things right. It doesn’t make sense that I’d so often be late.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. What is keeping me from being on time? I definitely don’t enjoy running late. Every morning as I’m running around my room, struggling to get ready and get to class on time, I silently curse my inability to be punctual. If I could, I would be on time for everything. Plus, I worry about people perceiving my being late as a lack of respect or competence. My friends don’t seem to mind when I show up ten minutes late to dinner, but I’m sure that my future boss won’t appreciate me rolling in ten minutes late to a meeting. So what’s holding me back? I’ve considered a few possibilities.It’s not exactly about a lack of available time to get ready. I’ve thought that this was the problem before. In high school, sick of the stress of racing to make it to school before the bell, I decided to get up half an hour earlier. I thought that this would solve my problem. Now I would have plenty of time to get everything done. For the first few days, that is how it went. But after a week or so, I found myself slipping back into my old routine, somehow managing to leave the house as late as before. Somehow I was filling up the extra time I had so that it didn’t make a difference. Plus, I was way more tired.
Sometimes I think that my chronic lateness stems from my perfectionism. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been put behind schedule because my eyeliner wasn’t exactly right, or the multiple times that I have changed my clothes because I thought the blue of my shirt was too close to the color of my jeans (true story). No matter how much time I have to get ready, I find that I can fill it by agonizing over all sorts of little details. I like to feel like everything, from my appearance to my work, is as under control as possible. While being a perfectionist does help me sometimes (I’m generally a hard worker, because I won’t accept anything less than my best, and that pays off), it can also hurt me (I get caught up worrying about small things that don’t matter to anyone but me). That often makes me late when I shouldn’t be.
I also think that I am often late because I am overly optimistic about how long it will take me to do things. When I get invested in working on something, or interested in sleeping another ten minutes, I tell myself that I will have time later to do the things that I have to do before I go to class/lunch/wherever. Sure, I can get ready for class in ten minutes, I tell myself. I’ve never been able to do it before, but obviously this will be the first time that I will manage it. And, invariably, I find that I don’t have the time that I thought I did. Then, I’m left fast-walking down Middle Path, wishing that I’d been able to eat breakfast or run a brush through my hair another time or just generally to not have to rush to make it to class. Going forward, I wonder if I can change my late-running ways. Is being late just a quirk of my personality, or is it something that I can control? I sincerely hope it’s the latter. While I acknowledge that I have a natural tendency to run behind schedule, I have hope that I can get better at being punctual (or even early!) for things. If I am realistic about the amount of time I have to work with and learn to accept that I don’t have to be perfect with everything (or most things), I think I will be just fine.