'I don’t feel like I’m getting credit for any of the hard, hard work I’m doing. I do poorly at work, I do poorly at school, my personal life is largely on hold, and I’m always stressed and anxious and tired'
I’m tired. Right now, I’m working full time in a law firm while also going to school full time. Most of the people my age have already graduated from college and moved on to grad school or their degrees, but I took a different path and I’m just now finishing up my bachelor’s degree so I can, hopefully, go to law school.
My incredible, supportive partner and I have been talking about the possibility of me finding a job that is more part time so that I can be more balanced and maybe even take on more schoolwork to get through undergrad faster. I am so, so fucking tired and miserable and constantly on edge that all I want to do is quit, pare down my responsibilities, focus on finishing up this stupid fucking bachelor’s degree so I can just move on.
I want to be big and tall and self-assured about it all. I want to believe things like “I can be smart and great even if I didn’t have it in me to get into a great college when I was 18,” and “26 isn’t too old to get your first college degree,” and “What I learn from this long and hard path I’m on is the best thing I’m going to bring to the table in ten years,” but I feel so cut down and useless every day that I’m increasingly unsure of it all.
You feel guilty for sleeping eight hours or having sex? Dude. I mean. I don’t even know where to start. Your brain is a 24/7 broadcast of self-recrimination. Yes, you need therapy. And sleep and sex. You also need to find part-time work. You need to learn to quit things again. You need balance. You need to train your brain to stop beating you up every second of every day.
As I write those words, though, I know how foreign and impossible they’ll look to you. For someone who doesn’t understand how to take care of herself, the words “Protect yourself” and “Listen to your heart” and “Honor your needs” just sound like a load of shit, like some lady-magazine fluff about bubble baths and sheet masks and journaling. But truly PROTECTING and VALUING yourself is a minute-by-minute experience.
That doesn’t mean you have to panic about how much time you have left to do the things you need to do. That means you need to learn to slow down time by savoring your existence. You need to learn to take a deep breath and sit with the silence around that breath. You need to learn to stop. You need to learn to listen to other people, to what they’re really saying. You need to learn to feel what you feel without attacking yourself for having feelings. You need to slow the fuck down.
After I had kids, it seemed like I had less time suddenly, and I panicked at first. But then I learned to savor my time with my kids AND make more efficient use of my work time. I figured out that I could only pull it off when I was exercising and sleeping well at night. Having EVEN MORE THINGS TO JUGGLE made me a much more efficient, harder working, more ambitious person, but it also made me much more relaxed and less guilty.
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