Balance and Limits

I’m starting over. I’m throwing away everything I’ve done on a near daily basis since starting this blog and rethinking everything before starting over. I burned out and in quite spectacular a fashion, too. I’ve noticed that I’ve hit this cycle a few times already in the past, and I could feel myself entering this cycle again a few months ago or so, but I didn’t know how to course correct. I had committed myself to so many things, and I loved the progress I was making during this productivity flow, but I was completely ignoring all the signs that were pointing toward burn out. So, I’m starting over.

I don’t know what my new days will look like, but I know I can’t commit myself to so many things anymore. I wrote in the morning, but I didn’t in the afternoon. I stopped transcribing A Farewell to Arms for now¹, and I’m thinking of reading in the mornings instead. It won’t be a long session, thirty to forty-five minutes tops, but it’ll be better for me as I can the evening to relax and have some fun. One thing I didn’t do today is workout. I didn’t do it as a sort of test because I wanted to see how I felt by not doing it, and I felt guilty and sad. I need to work out, even if I don’t feel like it. So one idea I had was working out immediately after coming home from work. That way I won’t let my mind interfere and possibly stop me. I just do it. But, I’m not sure. Just thinking out loud.

I played more Batman: Arkham Asylum today. I finished the game yesterday, and now I’m trying to get to 100% completion by finding all the puzzles and hidden areas of the game. I’m a completionist that way. I would love to spend more time playing video games because they’re fun and they really do help me relax. The danger is playing more than I should, especially if it interferes with my other tasks. Like with anything, it’s finding a balance, and that’s the struggle for me. It has been since the early days of this blog when I was trying to find the right balance then.

One thing I need to do is write every night, and that’s where this blog comes in handy. I love that I have this blog. It’s an outlet for me to simply express myself and document the journey I’m on. That’s all it does, but it means a lot to me, and I’m so grateful to have it. I’m still giving myself 500 words an entry, but that’s more out of habit than anything else. I’m not sure if that will change anytime soon. Maybe I’ll allow myself fewer words if the entry asks for it, but I have to be careful about that. I could convince myself that every entry I write deserves fewer than 500 words, and then I start becoming lazy and then I might just stop writing all together. So I need limits.

To recap: I need to write my novel in the morning, I need to workout in the afternoons, and I need to write my blog at night. Everything else is secondary. That means I’m giving reading and playing video games the same weight in relation to each other. Put another way, my three big rocks are writing, working out, and writing again. The rest is simply pebbles and gravel. I can live with that.