On any given day, here are the things that I like to accomplish in my free time:
- Write
- Run
- Watch wrestling
- Watch tv in general
- Play Fire Emblem Heroes and/or Pokémon Go
- Do surveys
Coincidentally, that just so happens to be the list of things that I so rarely get to do anymore, on account of the fact that I’m just so endlessly busy, with a plate so perpetually full, that I’ve been feeling on the cusp of anxiety attacks at just how much stuff I feel that I have to do on a regular basis, with practically no help at all.
The fact that I’m writing now is a miracle in itself, and I mentally would really like to accomplish a whole fuckton of writing that’s been backlogging in my brain as well as on the living document I keep a list of topics and things I’d like to write about but the reality is that as much as I love to write, there’s only a certain amount of it I can do daily before the topics begin to run into each other and I put out a bunch of bullshit that I’m not happy with.
Over the last few weeks, my daily schedule hasn’t really changed so much as it’s just had things added to it, as some of them have finite timelines in which they should be accomplished. However, it’s these extra things that have nickeled and dimed their way into overfilling my plate on a regular basis, and the’ve all been constantly bleeding into all facets of my time not spent working and/or raising a child, that I’ve hit the point where “burned out” doesn’t come close to describing how I feel so much as I just simply feel like I’m drowning.
My daily schedule usually looks something like this:
- Wake up at 6:30 am to start my daughter’s day
- On weekdays, overlap start of work day with time spent with daughter until she goes down for nap at around 8:30
- Work my job where my boss is actively trying to make my life miserable to make me quit so she can replace me with a sock puppet yes man, usually more than eight hours a day
- Feed, play with, bathe my daughter until bedtime at around 6:30 pm
So usually my “free time” begins at roughly 6:45-ish, but from this time until bedtime, I have to accomplish the following:
- Clean rooms, dishes and bottles my daughter utilized throughout the day
- Clean and feed guinea pigs
- Prep tomorrow’s bottles
- Straighten up around the house in general
Amidst these chores, there may be dinner, that lately has been more and more been takeout, because I simply don’t have the time or capacity to do much cooking. Also amidst all these tasks, I lament about 50 times about how I feel like I can’t do all this on my own, but still do.
However, in addition to my already packed plate, I have added the following things that make me question my life in general, and add to my ever-increasing frustration with how I have had an extremely scant amount of time in which I can actually decompress, wind down and simply relax:
- Night class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which begins at 9 pm if the instructors are on time, and ends at 11 pm
- Weekly homework from said night class that often involves the necessity to involve outside parties in order to do testing and experimentation
- Conversion of the guest room into a children’s room, which involves the following sub-tasks:
- Moving furniture
- Painting trim and walls eventually
- Putting up a mural eventually
- Cleaning
- Speaking of children, now that my child has become increasingly mobile, there are all sorts of baby-proofing that’s needing to be done, including the fabrication and construction of DIY baby gates, because there is an aesthetic to the home I wish to maintain, even in lieu of needing baby gates
Needless to say, it’s safe to state that I am overworked, every single day. Weekends give me no reprieve, as unlike the weekdays, I do not have my nanny to alleviate four hours of the day to where I can actually be productive with one of the numerous projects/chores/tasks that need to be done.
By the time I am typically done with chores and at stopping points with all my projects, it’s usually past 10:00 pm, often closer to 11:00 pm, and I am mentally fried, physically exhausted, and completely feeling, well, kind of traumatized at just how stressed out and overwhelmed I feel. My anxiety is impossible to suppress, I am always pissed off, and nothing brings me any relief. I don’t have time for any fucking relief, and I just don’t know when I will actually have some time to simply relax.
This unfortunately also happened to be the case on periods of time during the weekend of my daughter’s birthday. I was genuinely happy to have gotten to celebrate a coronavirus-era version of a birthday party, but I was undoubtedly overwhelmed and overworked throughout the rest of the weekend, and felt anxious and irritable at the hole I felt like I was falling into throughout the time, and I ended the weekend feeling fried and agitated, in spite of the joyous times the days prior.
The fact that I’m writing right now is probably conflicting with something more productive I could be doing, but I like to tell myself that I’m not doing some things, because my daughter is sleeping and it would make too much noise, or I’m skirting some other duties because I don’t have the physical materials in order to do them yet, and I’m in a position where every single thing requires some explanation or justification to why I’m not working on something else instead.
But that list of things that I would like to be doing whenever I have a free few minutes here and there? Yeah, none of that shit has really happened for a while now, and it’s only adding to my angst and general discontent with my non-parenting life that I feel every single day.
