Small Strokes Big Oaks

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’m going to go ahead and just say this, and hope it doesn’t sound too woe-is-me or self-centered or any of that.

I am doing much more than any normal person should ever be expected to do.

I no particular order: I’m planning a wedding, writing a Master’s thesis, blogging for a really great travel itinerary company, fundraising for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, and teaching high school.

There.  I said it.  I’m not going to spend this blog post complaining about it.  I’ve spent enough time complaining about it.  I know everyone has a lot going on.  Lately, I’ve read more blog posts than I can count about the need to take a break for real-life stuff.  I’m relatively new to the activist blogosphere – I started this blog in June, but have been keeping some form of blog since undergrad – but I’m going to guess that real-life hits in the fall because the entire world operates on the lazy-summer-but-back-to-work-in-fall model that we encounter during school.

I originally started this blog to keep track of my work for grad school, and along with that, I wanted to write about my personal experience of feminism.  Instead of doing that, now, I feel as if I am analyzing everything.  Why do I do this?  Because my readers like my analysis.  I get more hits and comments on days with posts that are analytical in nature than I do on posts that are intensely personal.  And I feel like my analysis adds more to the discussion than my personal experiences do.  And I like analyzing things; it’s just what I do – what I have always done.  But it’s a lot of work to pick everything apart to pieces all of the time, and, quite frankly, it makes me feel awful by the end of it.  There is so much in this world that is not right, and the more I focus on it, the more depressed I get about it.

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now, and two weeks ago, my fiancé and I took a trip to Madison to get our engagement pictures taken, and to just shut out the world for a while.  I left my computer at home.  I turned my cell phone off.  And a strange thing happened:  I felt happy.  So, we came back from Madison and I left my computer off for two weeks, except to do a little bit of homework.

But then, I started to feel bad again.  I made a commitment to this blog, and I made a commitment to feminism and activism, not to mention that this blog and the community surrounding it is sort of the focal point of my Master’s thesis, which is far from finished.  I started to feel like, if I couldn’t do it all, I wasn’t worth much – as a feminist, an activist, a blogger, a person.

This simply isn’t true, and I must remedy this situation.  I am worth a lot, and this blog means a lot to me (and, I hope, to you, too).  I need to stop thinking that if I can’t do everything I am worth nothing.

Apparently Wednesday was Love Your Body Day.  Well, I’m making today Love Myself day, and I am making this promise to myself and to my readers: I am going to love myself enough to know and respect my limits, and to not talk myself into feeling worthless when something takes a little longer to get done than I expected.  I am going to feel great about all of the good things I am doing, and I am going to make time in my life for the things that are important to me.

I encourage all of you who are feeling overwhelmed with life and blogging and activism right now to make the same promise to yourselves, and if you do, please post a link in the comments.