Today was just a quiet day, mainly.
This morning I caught up with an Oxford friend who is currently in Australia doing her PhD. We haven’t caught up properly in ages. The last time I saw her was in April, when I was doing my utmost to get over the crushing blow (crush) of my life thus far, when I helped her pack her life into bags one day, and went punting with her the next, the day before she was going to fly, I think. We lived fast. We were young. We still are.
We talked about our experiences moving abroad to big, cosmopolitan cities, during which the following similarities appeared:
- Commuting is the worst.
- We don’t go out as often as we should (see 1).
- Independence is difficult.
- We may be struggling to find purpose in what we do.
On that last point, it came up because she said she had heard someone say that burnout doesn’t necessarily come from overworking, but from working without seeing the point. And I wonder at that, but maybe it’s true. You can only gain satisfaction from something that requires work if you know it’s worth it. If you can visualise results, not necessarily see them immediately. It’s what started me jogging and working out in the mornings back in Oxford (well, that, and also it was catharsis from yet another heartbreak). It’s what motivates you to save money. It’s what keeps people together for the long haul – it may be painful now, but the work I put in will be worth it in the future. I reckon. I theorise.
See what you want in your mind’s eye, and think about it when the work to get it gets tough.
That said, I am also a firm believer in resting, and self-care, even if I have been atrocious at it in the past. My life has been known to be a cycle of “get really stressed – work really hard – collapse – do nothing – repeat”.
Consistency is key.
As cliché as that line is, it’s a good one. It’s one I need to learn.
Another friend also once said:
A change is as good as a break.
Which I do take on board. The context he said it in was when I said that I was not going on holiday that summer, as I was assistant directing a production of Oliver! You know, I think it’s applicable in every day life.
The Change Method
So, what I try to do is to have an equal number of admin and household chores, intellectual and manual labour, ideally some creative and fun stuff mixed in.
A sample way to organise your time could be:
- Darn socks
- Write email to supervisor detailing draft project plan
- Make bread
- Read project-necessary article
- Do French grammar quiz
- Organise stationery
- 5 minutes of yoga
- Write a letter to the siblings
And you notice that this roughly follows a “manual-intellectual” switch pattern, but classing two simple intellectual, or two short manual tasks together is a good idea, too.
No, I wasn’t incredibly saintly today, however. I made pancakes for lunch, for a start. It was a decent batch, and could well have given me two meals, but it made me one, and I was still hungry. I consumed more butter than I can think about without shuddering. And then I procrastinated reading an article I need to finish for my Linguistics project. I handwashed some clothing instead. I deleted a whole bunch of emails from my inbox. I listened to some music. I searched up some clips of an obscure play. I thought, Bella, aren’t you going to be very happy once you’ve finished this task? But I thought, But I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to look at a screen. Says the girl who would otherwise be looking at a screen. No, friends, I have not been well today. Made worse by the fact that my landlady asked me to let her dog in and out whilst they were away in Versailles on a family birthday celebration, and though I opened the kitchen door twice, I had no sight of the dog. I wondered, did they take her with them after all? And it rained this afternoon. And apparently she was outside. And what I should have done was call her name several times. And now I feel terrible.
Don’t assume anything except the plan you were previously given, unless you’ve been given reason to presume otherwise.
And more importantly:
Don’t accept responsibility for something you can’t handle.
But this much I could.
It’s not the end of the world, but the individual-prone-to-guilt that I am is gonna take a while to let this go. So:
Beating yourself up never solved anything.
You could beat yourself up, or, you could just learn from your mistakes, and strive to do differently. I’m not going to say “better”, because that is vague. I’m going to say “differently”, because there are 1000 different ways that something can’t work, and only 1 in which it does. Usually. Sometimes there are 2, or 3, depending on the circumstances. But ordinarily the wrong answers significantly outnumber the right ones.
Did I finish my article? Yes, I did. Because I told myself there is no way I am writing a blogpost, and ending my day, without doing so.
Tomorrow, I come into work and step into the shoes of my boss. And I know my purpose – it is to make sure that everything is ticking over. Everything is running. Everyone is happy.
At Least Afloat 