Balance-iaga

So.  In trying not to live a binary life, it's not that I decided to give up the blog, it's just that I let it go for a time.  There were plenty of points at which I wanted to write, but the increasing guilt of multiple projects kept getting in my way, making me feel guilty for wanting to spend time writing.  After all, if I had time to write a blog post, there would be enough time to do that research/drawing/shopping/budgeting thing I'd been delaying.

But corollary to that, to be perfectly honest, I spent this summer being happy.  Sometime in May, the crushing and overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety I'd been harboring about my personal life lifted.  It was a feeling that I didn't recognize at first, but eventually it started making sense.  I just wasn't worried anymore.  I started enjoying myself and enjoying my time, making friends, eating good food, getting very drunk, spending an absurd about of money on an arm sleeve tattoo...

So this all got me thinking (I know, you're shocked).  Right now in one of my classes, we're talking about life priorities.  The theory is that if you can recognize the thing you want (or want to be) more than anything else, you can see how you tend to make choices around that, or how you can shape future choices to manifest that reality.  My example is for years and years, even up to recently, my priority has always been work.  Family, friends, marriage, my body, everything took a back seat to work.  Work always came first.  I'd work for months without a day off, without making an effort anywhere else, all for the sake of being the most "successful" at my job.

The thing that I've slowly realized is that work isn't my priority any more.  Don't get me wrong: it's hella important and it's still a major expectation that I work hard.  What I'm saying is that I no longer find a sustaining satisfaction out of solely prioritizing professional success.  When work takes over my life, I can recognize that I have a harder time maintaining my happiness.  When work prevents me from taking time to relax, enjoy, or simply find a quiet moment, my anxiety spikes, my sleep disappears, and generally I feel like a lump.

I've come to realize that my focal priority has shifted, pretty dramatically, and that I believe my new priority is health.  Having lived a dramatically unhealthy lifestyle for so long, the slow, incremental (FRUSTRATINGLY incremental) undoing of the damage I did to myself is what I want to spend my time on more than anything.  I look forward to therapy and to working out, so much so that, even in a week of double tech in two different cities, I still got in 6 workouts in 7 days, and I didn't once blow out my calorie count.  DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD THAT WAS DURING TECH!?!?!  Still waiting for my award...

What's odd is that this revelation actually makes me feel unsettled, as opposed to empowered.  I think that's OK to feel this way, because realizing your life has shifted is a pretty big discovery.  I think I just don't know HOW yet to pull away from work in such a way that doesn't make me feel like a failure, but make it more strategic, more balanced.  I'm coming off of one of the most intense months of working I've ever experienced, and I'm still in many ways processing the experience, so it's not the right time to be making decisions about anything professionally.

At the end of the day, I'm happy to have found a new project: how do I live my healthiest life?  It's exciting, it's terrifying, it's probably the same feeling Oprah had in the mid-2000's.  For once I'm really not sure of my master plan, of my trajectory, of my sustained commitment to a field that demands much and gives little.  I'm not sure how healthy it is, long-term, to have so much stress and frustration centered around skirt and shoe choices.

Don't get me wrong: I love what I do.  But I want to love myself more.  So for now, I only exist with the question of balance without having any answers yet.  For a start, though, I'm going to give myself permission to stop and write about my thoughts, spreadsheet deadlines be damned.


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