thanksgiving & going back to work

I’ve gone back to work.

Here are a lot of photos of me holding onto my hat, because after five months off, this is my brain on work:

“I’m going to let you lock your keys and work phone in the car at the beginning of the busiest day of the month… and instead I’m going to let you remember a specific dent on a specific fridge in a specific apartment from A YEAR AGO, just so you won’t charge a tenant for something they didn’t do. You’re welcome.”

Is that what work/life balance means?

I feel that the only way you can have a satisfying work/life balance if is you start paying someone to do things for you.

Paying someone to clean your house. Mow your lawn. Finish those DIY reno’s you’ve been planning forever. Watch your kids. Walk your dog. Pick up your groceries.

What I would really love? Ideally? I’d 100% pay someone to come over every morning to blow dry my hair and do my makeup while I blearily sip coffee in a gigantic robe and a pair of Brian’s wool socks.

Alternatively, you could ask your mom to move in.

Otherwise, I’m not sure how everything is going to get done. Three days of work and Saturday night is me eating pizza in bed and falling asleep at 8:30 pm for a 12 hour snooze-fest, complete with nap the next day.

To write this blog post, I’m ignoring the fact that I could be cleaning, organizing, showering, getting groceries, or going out with friends.

(Could, not should. No should's allowed in this space.)

Writing gives me lots of pleasure. But it’s still a choice to do that enjoyable, hard, rewarding thing over all the other mostly necessary things that I have not [yet] started paying people to do.

Every month, I set an intention. September, and now October too, because it's a big one, have the intention of gratitude.

On the way to work, I listen to an affirmation podcast. Episode 127 is currently on repeat. This is what it says:

"Instead of being swayed by "do this" or "don't do that", "think this" or "don't think that", "be this" or "don't be that", I am grounded and rooted in conducting myself in what feels true, authentic, and professional to me."

What I've boiled it down to, as I dash through the work day, as messages pile up on my desk, as my phone battery lives - and dies - on the edge, as I go through the drive through for chicken nuggets because I was too tired to make a lunch the night before, is a single phrase.

I am calm and grounded.

Was I was calm and grounded (or at least chanting that I was) when I locked my keys in my car?

Um, maybe not. I may have been having a melt down in the Co-op parking lot.

But I was certainly saying thank you and I’m so happy and grateful when BCAA showed up 5 minutes later like it ain’t no big thang. Forever and ever CAA, amen.

It’s a balance.