I get fun questions like “when do you have time to write so much?” and “do you have a job?” so often that it inspired this post.
A little background - when I was 21 years old, I took 27 credit hours from two different universities (my main one only allowed me to take 21, so I enrolled into a community college to cover some electives with the Dean’s permission) and I worked three different jobs (a bank lead teller, a Spanish tutor, and a babysitter in a church). Did I mention I was pursuing four undergraduate specialties (finance, banking, investments and Spanish) with honors in three years? And my GPA was 3.9 something or close to that (enough to get invited to Beta Gamma Sigma, the highest honor a business student can earn). I finished my MBA with a Risk Management specialization while working full time in two years, and on the last stretch of that program I was quite pregnant :) All of this is not to brag but to show that I know how to handle busy. I don’t like it, but I have experience.
Fast forward to now. I work a demanding full time accounting job that uses my brain to the max sometimes, and I have a family which includes an energetic and bossy four year old. I cook almost every night enough for dinner and lunch the next day. So when do I write? At night. On weekends. Sometimes, it’s a couple of sentences at a time.
A typical day looks something like this: wake up at 5:40 am and work out. Sometimes, it gets pushed to when I get home. Since having my kiddo and needing to take prednisone for a severe allergic reaction which made me balloon, I lost 58 lbs (and counting) in the last 3 years (15 in the last 6 months). I go to work for 9 hours, then pick up the kid, come home, work out if I skipped that morning, make dinner, spend time with family. The husband handles most of the cleaning (he's awesome). Once the kid is in bed, the skincare happens. Husband is usually doing his own workout in the basement at that time, while I sit on the couch in a sheet mask writing the next blog post. After he’s done, we spend time together before heading to bed. I take pictures mostly on weekend mornings when the lighting is best. I do A LOT of things on my phone, like posting to Instagram or keeping up with the Facebook group. Sometimes, I write reviews on my lunch break at work or while waiting for the water to boil/dinner to bake/tea to steep. Right now, it's almost 10 pm and I'm writing reviews in the basement - I'm such a party animal!
In many ways, I have a lot more time today than I did at 21, before marriage and a kid. Or maybe I just manage it better. And yes, I get tired. So, sometimes, I take a night off and just become a couch potato with a game controller in my hand or a good audio book and a hot bath. I struggle “turning off” the creative juices and the workaholic tendencies and just relaxing (I want to write ALL THE THINGS), but I’m working on that.
The main point in all of this is writing gives me joy. Hearing that someone actually reads this stuff AND finds it useful gives me joy. Taking a picture that turned out just write gives me joy. And what’s life without joy?