This isn’t surprising, but I started law school three weeks ago. I’ve been doing it at night with my day job, and I don’t know why it’s surprising, but I’ve been hitting a horribly depressing reality: I don’t have free time anymore.
I try to stick to my own schedule with writing, but I also try to write every day. I try to run, but I hadn’t been running much for a bit. With my day job being busy and consuming and school being busy and consuming, I really haven’t had time for anything else. I have been able to carve out time for running, but everything else has kind of fallen by the wayside.
This is what it’s like to be a new parent, I tell myself. This is what it’s like when I’ll have kids.
Beyond that, there’s a sense this is what I signed up for. No one forced me into this new job. No one forced me into law school. I chose these fates for myself, and I’m making it so I have to be high-performing in both my job and my school.
The truth is most things are what you make them.
I think this way about therapy because I once did a therapy session where all I talked about with a therapist was football. Sure, the therapist may have guided the discussion, but I let it happen without talking about deep internal work and trauma I have to uncover. A lot of people would say there’s nothing wrong with that, but I could talk about football with my friends any day of the week — I wasn’t ready to talk about deep internal stuff at the time.
But what I learned then is therapy is often what you make it. You have to take the big leaps to talk about things you never want to talk about in your daily life. It’s not comfortable, but I personally have found it necessary.
Similarly, people can say all they want about their jobs and school being what they make them as well. I’m not saying everything is just as stressful as you make it because that would be dismissive of way too many people’s oppressive circumstances.
But…I think we can control our reactions and how much of ourselves we want to put into everything. Over the past few months of the tough circumstances I have subjected myself to, I realize I’m the type of person who always needs to believe I did things my way, by my own choice and volition. I have to believe I’m the one making all the important decisions by myself, defying other people’s conventional wisdom.
That’s always been a part of me, and that’s always been a part of a lot of people. I’ve been a bit wiser about chilling out and not giving all of myself all the time.
According to Chris Weller at Insider, people are spending more time than ever multi-tasking right now, which psychologists say is making people feel very pressed for time. People are working from home more often, and they’re also spending much longer time in the office and working during the weekends as well.
I don’t think it’s that simple — perhaps multi-tasking is a part of it, but it’s about a deeper cultural shift to having to be available and working all the time. It’s the need to always need to advance yourself all the time.
Be intentional about giving yourself free time
I am trying to give myself an hour of free time a night. This time includes no work and no school. It includes time to just allow myself to write, but sometimes I do just let myself chill out and do something else, like playing video games.
I think everyone needs a “free time” period of the day, as short as it is. It can be tuning out during a lunch break. It can be going to bed an hour earlier to wake up an hour earlier.
In running, you can’t go all out all the time. It’s a recipe for disaster. Listening to your body and learning to be slightly underwhelming in everything you do and pull back when you need to actually optimizes performance.
In real life, that means scaling back a little bit. It means chilling when you need to.
There’s a season for everything — a time to chill, and a time to go hard. I find that listening to yourself and trusting in your instincts for when to do both is the best way to go. That radical trust takes time, but it’s what’s gotten me this far, even when I felt like I couldn’t keep going.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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