The past week has been overwhelming for me.
Nothing has gone wrong, nothing has veered off track – it’s not catastrophe that has overwhelmed me. It’s change.
In the van, there was little routine but there was familiarity. 17.5 months of waking up in the same bed, in the same vehicle. Once the doors are closed, it barely matters where the van is parked. It’s all the same on the inside.
In contrast, moving is stressful. Even when you’re moving out of a vehicle, it is stressful. It’s less about moving of physical things (although I do find myself wondering how we fit it all and how on earth there is this much to move) and more about settling in somewhere new.
Learning the sounds a house makes as it settles. Remembering where you are when you wake up in an unfamiliar bedroom. Navigating new city streets in a different language (New Mexico has spoken Spanish for hundreds of years more than English.) Finding the spices you stuck in a cabinet – one of these damn cabinets.
There is so much change that comes with moving. Add to that a heavy client roster, my period, and my husband flying to Ohio in the middle of the week, and little wonder that I haven’t been nearly as productive over the past 5 days as I hoped. I find myself wanting to nest down and spend hours folding clothes rather than writing pieces. I want to rearrange our kitchen and bathroom rather than edit magazine articles. I want my professional responsibilities to hit pause and freeze in place. Alas, they do not.
I do not help myself by not saying no to new projects even in the midst of all this. Call it greed, call it masochism, but when the opportunity to make more money comes knocking at my door, I have a hard time saying no. The fact that I also want to bury my head in a 500-page book is unhelpful in the face of machine-like production – and overwhelming.
How do I manage? That is the million-dollar question. Some days I am a champion of productivity and I go to bed basking in the glow of a crossed-off to-do list. Other days the endless bullet points mock me into smoking another bowl and closing my laptop. A perfect system it is not. I watch my dog rolling around in the grass in a contentment ceremony, and remind myself that life is not an endless stream of tasks.
Things are left undone. Even four years into business I am guilty of constantly overestimating my capacity for tasks and so things get pushed from day to day and week to week. The fact that these are typically tasks for my own business does little to make me feel less behind.
Add onto that all of the things that need to be done when you move somewhere new and everything that needs to be done to clean out the van, and my task list unrolls before me like a rich kid’s Christmas list. In fact, I almost skipped this blog today just to do one less thing. But here I am, writing it anyway.
The only way out is through. Maybe I’ll write a blog next week, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll turn my list of notes into proper product review, maybe I won’t. But what I will do is what I absolutely need to – hit my client deadlines, feed myself (and my dog), and pay my bills. Everything else is extra.
