Day 45: Work / Life Balance

Last night, I dreamed my boss and her entire family were living in our basement. The pervasive feeling was one of insecurity, of being watched and scrutinized over and above a normal amount.

It seems unsettling — though not altogether surprising — these feeling have surfaced now, as I spend Friday Zoom-teaching from my kitchen.

Then, add in the general uncertainty around the virus and whether or how we can go to school this week. For example, writing this at 5:45 AM, I remain unsure whether any or none of our three schools will open for instruction today. 

That feels incredibly stressful and strange. It forces me to bring work and work concerns home and keeps them constantly front of mind, instead of allowing me them to shut them down occasionally.

So, I am a hot-stress-mess right now. 

All the lines I had so carefully drawn, boundaries separating work and home lives to keep myself sane in a very demanding and emotionally exhausting job, boundaries it took years and hours of therapy to meticulously carve out, have been decimated. 

This fall, right up until Winter Break, I had begun to trace those lines again — and it felt great. 

But now, after 5 days of school this new year, I have returned to this utterly untenable, uninhabitable mental space of thinking about work when I am not at work — and wondering what is going on in the world when I should be working! 

I can't concentrate at all. My head aches constantly.

And I must start over to rebuild my boundaries and the space and time to take care of myself. To breathe. To get what I need. 

Luckily, this is not my first rodeo. 

So, I grab on to whatever thread I can catch first: take a walk during work, do some yoga, eat a good breakfast. Stay off the screens, go to bed early. Wake up early to write. 

Bring my mental level of concern — which now encompasses the vaccination rates of countries halfway across the world and political instability we may face in two years’ time — down to a tiny pinprick of that which I really must do today. 

As my favorite yoga teacher says, all you really need to do all day is breathe in and breath out.

I have to physically get myself to work today (maybe?) and persist until 3:00. I have to make sure my children get to and from school (again, maybe? . . . The uncertainty of which threatens to take my fledgling concentration off on a death spiral . . but, deep breath.) I persist.

That makes, what, three things I must do today? 

But the most important of these is breathing. That one cannot be put off. 

So, each day, week, month, moment, I come back to breath. Again, as in March 2020 and many points since, I strive to rebuild that skeleton frame of my space. My boundaries. Some part of me that work and stress and others cannot have. 

Starting with where I am right now — one breath, inhale and exhale — and slowly, methodically pushing outward.