No

To be quite honest, I wasn’t sure if I felt up to writing a piece this week. In recent times I have allowed myself to post fortnightly rather than the usual weekly, as is the case when life gets a bit busy, but almost a whole 2 weeks had passed and I found myself inwardly groaning at the fact I needed to come up with something, anything, for a blog post this week. And funnily enough, that prickly reluctance I felt gnawing away at me to produce something provoked, in itself, a whole load of questions. Questions like,

“Who am I doing this for?”

“Why can’t I just say no to things?”

“Am I burning the candle at both ends?”

Now, no-one is holding a gun to my head when it comes to this blog; I want to do it. It fulfils me, as I'm sure your profession and hobbies do you, despite the time and effort they require. Striking this balance can be so hard. I’m sure at least one of those questions mentioned above resonates with you, reader, and your own personal and professional struggles of late. Our careers or fields of study ask so much of us, we have people in our life who depend on us to varying degrees, taking care of ourselves both physically and mentally takes considerable effort, and don’t get me started on the time black-hole that is laundry. It seems there aren’t enough hours in the day or the week for us to accomplish any of our goals, to move forward, to be productive. Cue feelings of panic, anxiety, low self-esteem, and devastated self-worth. This is where the concept of boundaries comes in.

Setting boundaries is something I’ve been ruminating over in a general sense for maybe the last 12 months or thereabouts. Doing so is very difficult, especially if you are, as I am, an unmerciful people-pleaser. All we want to do is be helpful, reduce the load for others, lest we hurt their feelings by saying no. The age-old phrase ‘biting off more than one can chew’ comes to mind. When our main goal is keeping other people happy, at the expense of our own satisfaction, there is very little peace to be found. Taking on more than we can cope with, be it career- or relationship-wise, might feel like ‘productivity’ and ‘kindness’ at first but, if poorly managed, will actually slowly eat away at us and our energy sources.

I am giving a platform to these thoughts right now as a direct result of feeling like this for the last maybe month or so. Between preparing for parent-teacher meetings and standardised testing at school, running around to various appointments I had scheduled, keeping up contact with friends and family and supporting them accordingly, saying yes to a non-work-related task that was actually extremely time-consuming, and getting in my usual daily habits of exercising, reading, household jobs, etc., I found myself stretched pretty thin. Some of those things listed may seem like privileged complaints and I am aware of that. I get that some people out of work at the moment would only love to have some big project into which to sink their teeth, and I also realise that hard work comes with reward. That acknowledged, this has been the first time in a good while that I genuinely feel overwhelmed, where I fall into bed every evening and am under within 3 minutes of my head hitting the pillow. I said yes to too many things. I gave top-priority urgency status to too many tasks. I didn’t pace myself properly. I didn’t want to let anyone down. Okay, that’s cool, but why am I the one that is sitting here on a Sunday evening writing this and feeling absolutely terrible?

We need to become more comfortable at saying no to things. Coming straight out with “to be quite honest, I’m juggling a lot at the moment and don’t feel I have the time/energy to properly devote to what you’re asking of me” (every Irish person reading this is screwing up their face in combined confusion/mortification at the mere thoughts of saying that aloud to anyone, I’m sure). But this is our problem. What is the worst thing that could happen if we said no to something we just know we don’t have the time for? Or, let’s face it, something we just don’t really care about or want to do? I currently have Grace Beverley’s book Working Hard, Hardly Working on the go, which addresses issues of burnout, efficiency, productivity, and success, among many others, as well as balancing them all. The line we have to toe is that of putting in the effort to achieve the goals we know will bring us true contentment, and knowing when to step away and say ‘enough is enough’.

Which is exactly what I’m going to do now because if I go on much longer, I’ll lose you, and I’ll also end up doing myself and my laptop an injury incase I collapse down on top of my keyboard with utter exhaustion. Adios.