Happy Tuesday, once again! To be honest, it feels like forever since I last sat down to write here. But its only been a week. Wow.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the last few weeks I’ve mostly been rambling about various topics that I’m feeling passionate about at that time. Not really sorry about that. Hopefully it isn’t quite as boring to read as my mind tells me it is…
Everyone at school is starting to talk about how close the end of the semester is – almost 5 weeks from now, to be precise! I’m kind of panicking about that for some reason. Maybe because this semester has absolutely flown by and I don’t understand where it went so quickly. And also because I keep thinking I have more time for all these final projects that I thought I did. Ouch. Guess I had better get moving on homework.
For the most part I feel like I’m getting everything done and managing to stay on top of all the things in my life. But my therapist reminded me last week that while I’m juggling all the different aspects of my life quite well right now, I often leave out the fact that I need to take care of myself as well. I turn in my homework early, get my practicing in, and make it to every single one of my classes and appointments on time, and those things are all great and awesome, but when she asked me when the last time was that I had gotten even six consecutive hours of sleep, I didn’t know. Or when I took the time to sit down and actually enjoy a meal instead of eating in the car or while poring over homework. I didn’t know the answer to that either. And of course, her point was made.
Because self care is so incredibly important. None of us give it enough value in our lives, when we ought to be giving it precedence over a lot of things. I’m trying to improve, but its hard. This morning I did the simple thing of tucking a novel into my backpack because after classes I have to take my car into the shop for an inspection and I’m going to spend those 20-30 minutes just enjoying my book. It’s important.
If you had told me at 18 or even 20 years old that I would skip on Friday night movies in order to work on a homework assignment, I would have probably laughed at you. But the last few weeks I have had to write myself a note in my planner that reminds me to go out and rent a movie so that I will take even just two hours out of my Friday evening to relax. It’s important to schedule in that time when you’re so crazy busy that your brain just falls apart.
Blogging actually is part of my self-care time. Even if I don’t get to do anything else, at least I can sit down and work on a project that is entirely something that I want to do. And for the most part, writing this blog is a form of self expression, which can almost always make me feel better, even when I’m not sure how it manages that. There is something about writing up a post about your feelings about life and hitting publish – which then sends that post out into the big wide world of… well… almost anything. As they say, once something has been put online, you can never really get it back. And I think there’s a certain level of anxiety that comes with blogging because there’s always people out there that disagree with you or some such nonsense and you just have to do your thing anyways. If you care so much about other people’s opinions on your self-expression that it starts to affect what you do, then it can’t even be called self-expression anymore, right?
Anyways, that’s my ramble for this week. I decided to be an absolute crazy person and participate in Camp NanoWrimo this month again, but with a simple idea and a meager goal of only 25,000 words. So I should probably get back to working on that project, don’t you think? And maybe I’ll put an excerpt of it up on Friday!
Until then! ~K
Katharine Marie 