where the meltdowns begin aka my studio

While curling up to go to sleep a few weeks ago my boyfriend asked me what’s wrong. This immediately triggered gushing tears and a report of how overwhelmed, tired, and guilty I felt. That Saturday I had only worked a couple of hours on my projects, like painting pet portraits or writing grants, and I felt bad I didn’t work 8. Previously that week I worked some 12 hour days, but others I did nothing because I was oscillating on the edge of burn out. That night I still wanted to hold myself to my 50+ hour work weeks I maintained all summer, but it seems like when the season started changing and I felt the end of summer looming so was my motivation.

I’m grateful to go through sincerely enjoyable obsessive working phases where I stay up till 3 am without care of sleep deprivation consequences. However, while these bouts are productive, they’re not sustainable. When they start to taper off I have to confront my empty shell of a body that does not want to do anything, commit to any new projects, or maintain any of the projects that need maintaining. I’ll start to look at Reddit, watch too much netflix, clean, or procrastinate in any form while an insidious guilty feeling that I should be doing something productive grows into paranoia. While watching Brooklyn Nine Nine I’ll think about how I could be easily updating my expenses spreadsheet or sending an email. It didn’t take long for this cycle to sum to zero and be cumulatively left in a spot where I’m neither productive or feeling recharged. My thoughts turn into an (inaccurate) self-deprecating analysis of how bad I am at running a business, or achieving my dreams, and I spiral into self-indulgent darkness of how worthless I am. Because at this state it takes less work to feel hate instead of love towards myself. Once this point is reached, of course, a breakdown soon follows.

I did not realize what was happening at first, this was more a messy explosion of tears and whining to my boyfriend, who I’m grateful was able to help. The first thing he helped me do was catalog all of my achievements this year. This was good because it is objective. I undoubtedly achieved goals above and beyond what I predicted, and listing them out began the process of being kind to myself even when I didn’t want to be. I am aware of the positive side effects being grateful has on my life, but in this moment I was quite lucky to have someone remind me.

Next came the solution. I had not really been all that productive for a week or two. I needed to recharge, but wasn’t actually relaxing because I was feeling so guilty and ashamed I wasn’t working more. But the answer is not doing more or less of either of those things, it’s being honest about how I’m spending my time and giving myself permission to spend it how I need. At that point I was burnt out and needed a break, but I needed to be more compassionate towards myself and allow it to really happen. I also needed to get SOME work done to maintain the progress of my projects. My boyfriend delightfully reminded me of why we humans need to time block, or have a sense of compartmentalizing. Compartmentalizing is a skill I thought only people with intense jobs need to use. Like my friend who is a sexual assault nurse examiner, or someone who deals with a more stressful job than drawing pretty pictures.

Psych — its not. The benefits of being realistic about when and where you give certain parts of yourself are useful to literally anyone. In my case I discovered I need to say: I am working on this project for this amount of time today, and any time after that I give myself permission to relax and enjoy whatever I choose. Maybe the idea of giving oneself permission as a full grown adult is silly, but maybe it’s not. The idea of permission has been an integral part of everyone’s life because of its inherent existence in our experiences of growing up, going to school, getting jobs, etc.. But because I work from home most of the time I don’t have any of the structure some other entity usually provides, and I need to learn how to provide it for myself.

While I am by no means a master of time blocking yet, I have already begun to find peace in this practice. Every night I take an inventory of what needs to be accomplished throughout the day or week and how I may most realistically balance those needs, whether they’re productive or recharging ones. Honestly, when my boyfriend told me to time block, the idea seemed glaringly obvious. So obvious I almost started to feel bad about myself again, but hey, adulting is hard, and I guess we gotta do it. I believe it’s easier to make life more complicated than it is to make it simple, and being hard on ourselves doesn’t truly move us forward. Maybe it takes a bit more work to love our mistakes, experiences, ourselves… but in the end we’re rewarded with the clarity and joy we’re truly striving for, and the Netflix we deserve to watch guilt free.

Here’s a cat I painted. He gets it.

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