Funny. If you’ve been playing along, you know by now that I had a Major Work Project (MWP) that ate up most of my life from late July through to mid-September, and that I’ve been digging myself out of that hole ever since. I passed, which is fantastic (!!), and I just found out last week that I actually passed in the top 28% of applicants, so that’s cool.
My productivity took a tumble, and my mental health’s been somewhat precarious as I pushed to catch up on everything and meet deadlines and so forth – not that I’m in a bad place, just that I’m so blood-suckingly exhausted that it hurts. Deadlines are over now for the year (at least the externally-imposed ones) and I’m working hard on being kind to myself and catching up on sleep.
But last week, I was roaming through the deep dark depths of my blog (I installed a new ‘articles like this’ plugin and of course then fell down the rabbit hole) and came across this post from April of this year. I remember this, listing out all the deadlines just so I could keep things straight in my head, the sudden panic as I realised how much I had put (willingly) on my plate.
I’ve been living this narrative lately, you see, of being all – well, the FIRST half of this year was just FINE, it’s all MWP’s fault that I crashed and having done much apart from dayjob this semester. And, okay, a lot of that is true. My word count for the first six months of the year was nearly 134,000 words, while my word count for July through October was a fraction over 12,000. But…… that doesn’t mean the first half of the year was actually sustainable. I’ve been telling myself that if only I hadn’t had the MWP, I would have been able to maintain that frantic pace all year.
But reading that April post suggests otherwise. I forgot that, at the time, those months also felt crazy and precarious.
Perspective, right? Either it felt frantic at the time but wasn’t really that bad in relation to the following few months, or it was frantic, and I’ve just forgotten, the memories dimming because it was a different kind of frantic. One can only wonder.
I’m not sure I have a point here, except to note for myself that next year, I need to dedicate myself to not living stretched at 110% every single waking hour of the day. It’s not good for my physical health, or my mental health, or my family, or or or or or. I’m not going to say I’m aiming for balance, because what even is that mythical thing anyway, and besides, what ‘balance’ is changes with every new season in your life. But I am going to try to focus more on important, and less on urgent. There will always be urgent; modern technology has blessed us with many things, not least of which is the ability to have a never-ending daily to-do list that’s greater than any person can any actually achieve. I’ll always not get something done. Hopefully, in 2019, that something that doesn’t get done won’t be looking after my sleep, my health, my family, or my writing – in that order.
And yes: this is your official permission, if you need it, to take a rest 🙂 <3