Radvent 2 - balancing
(This post is courtesy of a writing prompt series over on Princess Lasertron’s blog. I do them every year in my other blog. Maybe you’d like to do them, too!)
How do you do it all?
Firstly, I really love the idea that’s put forth in this writing prompt about not asking people what they do, but asking them what they like to do. This is something I’ve done quite a lot since I moved and started meeting so many new people. For me, it started out of insecurity - I felt weird because for the first time since I was about 17, I wasn’t working full time, so I did my best to avoid the subject. But it’s worked out great! I think actually it’s safe to say I don’t have a clue what some of my friends here do for work, but I know what all of them like to do.
For me, getting back to a place of health and productivity were exercises in learning to say no to things, to realize that I don’t have to be in charge of everything. It always felt so wrong to me to limit my plans to a certain subset of my million mile long grand plan, but I have finally come to realize that being finished is probably a nicer feeling than being (unattainably) perfect. I’m ok with that, finally. And once I recognized that, there was definitely a period of letting go of things that was kind of hard - having honesty day with my craft supplies, for example, or cleaning out all the nine thousand thousand textures I had planned to apply to various 3D objects I was going to sculpt myself. It also meant cutting ties with a small handful of people who put more strain on my life than the joy they gave back. I think that was probably the hardest part, initially, and the biggest load off, eventually.
Basically, it was time to balance the tires on my life, so I did. Oddly enough, I don’t think this would have happened if I hadn’t gotten so sick. I reached a point, though, thanks to a bad medication I was on for months, where I really couldn’t do anything for myself, and suddenly had to let other people help me out whether I wanted it or not. I was the crankiest person ever to have to give up so much control like that, but in the end, it helped me learn how to do it, and now I practice it regularly.
There is a Sylvia Plath quote (from the Bell Jar) that says:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
This perfectly encapsulates how I used to feel - so many figs, so little time, and so much stress about it. I’m so glad I realized I was starving. I chose to eat a few figs instead of watching them all rot, and that’s how I manage to get anything done at all.
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