I have difficulty giving myself down time. That might come as a surprise to people who knew me in childhood or high school, when procrastination was my specialty. These days, I don't give myself enough rest.
Part of me likes it like that. If I'm controlling my environment by cleaning or, more recently, packing for our upcoming move – or if I'm controlling my inner experience to some degree by sinking into my writing – or if I'm controlling my future actions with excessive planning and list making – then I'm not worrying as much about the things that I can't control.
(The other factor that keeps me busy, busier than everything else, is motherhood, but I can't control my children and I don't try to, so the engagement and time spent with my kids is its own category, neither the kind of work that I throw myself into to avoid thinking about anything stressful nor the kind of break I'm thinking of when I say “down time.” It's just...being a parent.)
And if I start moving – literally if I'm cleaning or working out, metaphorically with the writing and planning – and just...never stop...then the procrastinating slacker I am deep down inside can never break back through again.
Honestly this wasn't a problem in 2019 or before. I had my plans, I had my schedules, I had my tasks and my lists. But I wasn't excessive. This blog post was planned four months ago, because planning my content in advance in case I have a couple of weeks during which I don't have the inspiration for a topic works for me. Today's post was supposed to be about how I found the balance between letting myself relax and keeping myself productive. I was going to have started on that already.
Then 2020 happened. March is when the pandemic started to actually affect life here in the USA, but my husband and I had been watching the news since January. So when the governor of my state announced on March 12th that schools would be closed a few days later for, he claimed at the time, three weeks, we knew what was coming and went into hard lock down in our house on that day.
When it started, when coronavirus stripped away so many of the illusory pieces of control a lot of us let ourselves think we had, my coping strategies went into overdrive. It was alright at first, it made me feel better. But now it's starting to stress me out.
Okay, not starting. By now it's been stressing me out for a couple of weeks. I get up at 5 am every day to write before the kids wake up. I have a four year old and a one year old and I keep my house both clean and tidy – and that's not a brag, it's a cry for help. I have only been able to give myself one hour of down time a day, after the kids are in bed when I watch one or two episodes of a tv show before I go to bed to.
If I thought this was sustainable I'd probably never stop, but that wouldn't make it healthy.
So I'm working on trying to find the balance. I bought that super calm video game everyone's talking and meme-ing about (am I allowed to say their name? I don't know? but you know the one I mean) and I expect that to help. But this post was supposed to be written after I'd already accomplished the whole balance thing. But since I never found that balance I couldn't write the post and old procrastinator me got hold of my blogging habits in a bad way.
Which means that I'm doing it even right now. My original intent in writing this entry at last was, I thought, to force myself to find the work / down time balance. The idea was that if I publicly said, “I have a problem letting myself relax, I'm going to work on that,” then I'd have to. It would go on the list. I'd schedule it. Is that cheating? I don't care. It'll work. But I also used writing this post to get moving again on my blogging and now I feel like I just...can't...stop again.
Look for a new blog post exactly on schedule next week.
And maybe eventually screen shots of my island because gosh dang it I am going to start taking time for myself to relax.