Hey everyone,
Fellow writing parents, I don’t need to tell you that this year’s been a rough one. It’s one thing to work from home when you’ve got a spouse at work and a kid in school, but it’s an entirely different ballgame when your home becomes a school, a playground, and a conference room all at once.
It’s always a work-in-progress but I made a few more changes to my work and home life this year to ensure that while I’m still getting a lot of work done, I’m not giving up opportunities to have fun with my family and take advantage of this time together.
Here are some things I’ve cut down on this year that have led to more time, more focus, more clarity, and less angst:
- Answering hate mail or snarky comments.
- Forums and FB groups where there’s constant bickering and infighting about anything and everything.
- Time spent on social media.
- Reading three dozen news stories ON THE SAME INCIDENT.
- Obsessively fixing words and sentences on a writing draft, right until the moment of the deadline.
- Checking email while writing.
- Getting involved in group discussions about politics.
- Reading an email, marking it as unread to respond to later, reading it again, marking it as unread again to respond to later, reading it again, marking it as unread…. you get the drift.
- Holding myself, my partner or my child to unattainable or unreasonable standards.
- “Fixing” myself– my personality, my appearance, my habits, or my lifestyle.
The last one, in particular, is something I’d love to practice more and I think is important for all of us writing parents to take to heart. If you want to improve parts of your life (and I certainly do) then that’s fine, but you are not broken and you are not getting things wrong if you’re not achieving someone else’s standards of what your life, your body, or your personality should look like.
It’s exhausting trying to meet the unattainable standards of the world, and I for one, have stopped trying.
It’s freed up time, energy, and so much mental space.
Which is what I’ve needed a lot more of this year.
Cheers,
Natasha