How’s Life? | I need a break.

I have many posts detailing how busy my year has been and how I really have just been waiting to finally have some down time… Yet here we are, almost 2 months since I started my summer and I have not had time to myself yet.  

Jetting from country to country to big internship sounds incredibly glamorous, and don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful and in love with the opportunities I’ve had in the last 2 months… But I have come out of it all feeling incredibly overwhelmed.  My trip to Chicago was a once in a lifetime kind of thing, but it also consisted of 9-5 uni work and then a rush in the evenings to explore as much of a city as I could in 6 days.  I then briefly came back home for 4 days in which I had to pack, unpack, see friends and go to the theatre (The last 2 weren’t chores, but still gave me no time to rest), and then head to Morocco.  Morocco was again, amazing, but I’m a naturally introverted person and having a third week in a row where I was out constantly with no real opportunity to relax and gather my thoughts led my brain to suffer massively.  Then, the icing on the cake was the journey back from Morocco, a trip down to Bristol to move into my house the next day, and then back to London for 2 weeks at the Guardian.  A fully functioning moderately “mentally healthy” version of myself would have struggled to deal with all of that at once, but a couple of weeks ago I was hit with a family crisis that played on my emotionally for the following time period.

Dissociation + exhaustion + no time to yourself + constant changes of scenery = my mind at breaking point.

Busyness is often sold as this amazingly cool thing and a sign of how put together and efficient you are, but honestly too much busyness is a terrible thing.  We can preach the importance of self-care as much as we want but the busier you get the more self-care falls to the wasteside.  I haven’t had time to look after myself and my needs throughout all of this, because everything that’s purely for me has felt like time wasting.  Lounging in front of the TV?  Should be blogging; you have posts to write.  Wanna take a bath?  Shower takes half the time and you have dinner to make.  Anything I want to do to take a little “Selfish time” out has felt incredibly wrong… And that’s not a good mentality to have.  It’s all fun and games to say that “We’ll sleep when we’re dead” but sleep is important, as is taking breaks for yourself.

I want to work on myself for a bit.  I get given this super long summer from University so that I can recuperate from the stress I’ve gone through during the year, so why haven’t I done that yet?  It’s okay to want to just do your own thing for a bit, and it is perfectly understandable to put yourself first.  I just have to convince myself of these things.

(PS. That doesn’t mean the blog posts/videos are stopping… Part of my “self-care” is actually dedicating more time to working on my blog, because it’s essentially my passion project.  Should I do a post on what “self-care” consists of for me?  Because it’s a lot different that your typical bath and facemask.)

Hope you’ve enjoyed this insanely stressful ramble… How are you doing?  Let me know in the comments!

Lots of love,

Jas xx

 

BLOGLOVIN’ |  TWITTER  |  INSTAGRAM | FACEBOOK | YOUTUBE