Work/Life Balance – A Review

I’ve lived too much on both sides of the work life equation to not have anything to say about it. Problem is, I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

See, the way I see it, there is no real balance to a work/life balance. You either have it or you don’t. Some jobs exist outside the bounds of “operating hours” and others don’t even pretend to have such a thing in the first place. By that, of course, I’m talking about teaching. When it comes to teaching all of your work is done at home.

You’re basically a performer. One that just happens to be on stage for eight hours and then has to go home and plan out a new script for the next day. But on top of planning the script, you have to grade, attend meetings (for just about everything) and do your best to maintain a healthy relationship with your students and (in my case at least) their parents.

To be clear, I’m not complaining. School might consume most of my solitary hours, but that’s actually a great thing. See, I have this problem where I overthink just about everything.

But when I’ve got work on my plate, I can’t overthink anything because I’m too busy just normal thinking about the show I’ve got to put on tomorrow.

It baffles me to remember what my past jobs were like. Self-made hours, not having to do anything extra at home, ah, those were the days. Well. They were the days where I was occasionally filled with an existential unease about nearly everything.

But I also read more, wrote more, and ate better. I exercised every day, and was way more positive.

I’ve lived the same self-destructive loops in New York that I had already lived in California, and I don’t think either way works out better in the long run.

But, I have learned something about myself, incidentally. And it might be something I kind of already knew. I was a pretty big believer in this idea that maintaining small pains makes it easier to deal with big ones, which kind of explains the foundations for what I’m about to tell you:

I’m less anxious and less depressed when I haven’t slept.

Last week was great, but also terrible. I didn’t sleep at all, and it hurt a lot. But I made it through every night without anxiety. And I started every day on mostly the right foot. Whether or not I was able to put one foot in front of the other (oh oh ohoh!) after that is kind of a mixed bag, but them’s the breaks.

I’m not here to guess why insomnia took over, but the day after it left I was a nervous wreck. Honestly, I was disappointed in how anxious I was on Sunday. Granted, I had a particularly rough day prior. But still, life’s the thing that’s happening, and I just don’t really do well with that on a good night’s rest anymore.

When I told my “work” friend about it, I called it weird. But she told me that it wasn’t weird at all. I don’t remember her words, and I don’t want to put any into her mouth, but what I took from our conversation was that: if you’re feeling stressed about one thing, it’s cool if other things go bad.

And its true. Adding one problem to three hundred isn’t good, but it isn’t really the worst thing either. Especially if it’s a problem you can’t control, and at least know and understand. It puts everything else into perspective (and gives you an excuse if you screw up ;) ).

There’s a lot more to life than winning and losing. There’s a lot more to life than being right or being wrong. That’s not something I would’ve agreed with two years ago.

But it’s the learning that keeps me living. Even if it’s just learning some dumb quirk about myself, or some whole show to put on tomorrow.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Have a great week and happy Monday.