day64 - 'balance' is the word of the day
dear luci,
today i snuck out of work for an hour (known to some as a lunch break), to attend a phone appointment with my therapist. i was kind of dreading having to coordinate everything to make it work in time, but that didn't turn out to be an issue.
anyway, my therapist is a lovely lady. she's very soft spoken. she allows me to ramble on, interjecting with the occasional question, which is a very minimal approach-- but good god, somehow in my endless rambling she helps me realise shit. ironically enough for someone who was too anxious to ask for an hour off to go to fucking therapy, we talked about managing my work-life balance.
"the work time," i mused, "comes pre-allocated. the bitch of it is allocating the life time."
we talked about motivation and how i have none of it for doing the things i want to, when i get home at the end of the day. it's not always an energy thing (though it often is). we identified three factors that might motivate someone to do a task:
- a feeling of competence or mastery
- a feeling of connection or belonging
- a feeling of control or autonomy
during my days on-site, i don't get a ton of enriching human interaction. there are lovely little streams, yes, but never the oasis i so desperately long for. i also spend a lot of my time feeling completely fucking out of my depth. so i make up for my lack of connection at work by over correcting after-hours, spending so much time with others. what i'm not making up for are the missing feelings of competence.
so the idea is to identify which of these three quotas isn't being filled during the work-day, and either take steps to rectify that, or find ways to supplement them once i get home for the day.
it's also a matter of not beating myself up over not using my "Free-time", rare as it is these days, for something I deem worthy or adequately fulfilling. like i said last night, rest is not optional, it's mandatory. i would do well to remember that. no use beating myself up for not doing things that i actively don't have the energy to do.
my balancing act will no doubt continue. i'll falter, wobble, fall off the beam entirely. but with each fall, i'll learn what i might do differently next time. not better, just different.
i like my therapist. she makes these realisations feel so obvious once i've finally had them. "of course that's the way it is", says the girl who wouldn't have realised it without this conversation in the first place.
so be kind to yourself. falling is learning. balancing is never easy, never immediately intuitive. gravity is not forgiving. but you can be.
sweet dreams luci <3