I managed to spend one month without writing, mostly because I’ve been super stressed with work.
I feel super drained at the end of the day, I try to make progress in my side projects, but most of the time without success. Then when I can’t make progress in other areas of my life, I get stressed and feel guilty, and start this endless loop of feeling bad and shaming myself for not going after my dreams, my goals (outside of work). I cannot even explain how I get into this loop but once I start, it’s hard to jump out of it. If only if it was so simple as to add a break into my loop (programming joke to lighten up the mood :)).
I’ve been doing Yoga with Adrienne in the morning – honestly I’m surprised by how calm she makes me feel and I did yoga before (through videos as well) but never felt so connected with the practice as I do with her. And yes, after doing yoga at the beginning of the day, I feel amazing! Ready to take on the world, but then work happens and at the end of the day, not everyday but most, all my energy is gone.
And when my energy is gone, instead of accepting that I cannot work on my side projects, I try to do them anyway, and guess what? I’m not productive, I don’t see the point of doing them anymore. Then I feel sad that I don’t feel joy for anything lately.
The answer is to forgive myself, I’ll try to be better at accepting that I can only do so much. I believe it’s worst because we have access millions of websites/blog, how to accomplish this, how to accomplish that, like it was so easy, it’s not, we’re only seeing their success, not their path. I have to do grown up things in top of my job, I’m not in high school or college anymore. It’s weird but for some reason my brain doesn’t always accept that. It doesn’t accept the fact that I’ve a limited amount of time for me. And when it doesn’t accept that, it’s not my time anymore as I’m not fully present.
How did I get this amount of clarity? I’ve been in total relax mode since Saturday and since it was a 4 day weekend (15th of August is an holiday here in Portugal and yesterday I took the day off), I had time to relax, watch a movie, read a book, work on my side projects and now I see everything in perspective. Oh the irony! I get clarity in relax mode, not when I need it the most.
Nevertheless, it’s quite important for me to reach this conclusion. Not that I don’t know it already, I just have to remind myself every couple of months. And it comes down to this:
Only after I relax, I’m able to have space for the other goals in my life. And if one day, I want to arrive home and only watch TV, I’ve to be kind to myself and say: it’s okay. No big deal, you won’t die, it’s just one day.