“Do less. We can focus on 50-70% of the stuff we did before the crisis hit.”
This statement was included in an email I received last March about self-care. I saved these words and came across them again recently. My immediate thought was, Oh, please let that be true eleven whole months later.
Even though we’ve been at home (always at home, forever at home), it’s not exactly like we’re staycationing over here. My capacity feels eternally diminished. There are entire days I could scream over the mundane, when I don’t want to make another meal, deal with another fluctuating emotion, step over another LEGO on the floor, or sit for another virtual meeting.
While 50-70% felt impossible during the early days of the pandemic, when the news cycle never stopped with updates on COVID-19 and restrictions and school announcements and all the things, it still doesn’t always feel like we’ve moved past it all. Let’s be honest: sometimes 50-70% still feels like altogether too much.
On the heels of my first thought came this one: If 50-70% still feels impossible, why do I also feel as though I never stop moving?
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My kids recently went back to school in-person. I’m not used to it yet. We spent 40-plus weeks together and the reality that they’re back to their regularly scheduled programming has yet to sink in. I’m still distracted, unaccustomed to these uninterrupted blocks of time to complete my work.
Until recently, multitasking was less a lifestyle choice, but a necessity. I’d turned it into an art. Not like Renaissance art, with precise lines and a defined one-point perspective, but sloppy, splatter-y, fling-paint-at-the-canvas kind of art. Y’know how Jackson Pollock paintings often have cigarette butts embedded in them? That’s what my multi-tasking felt like: a canvas that’s been flung with paint and embedded with ashes.
Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.