I’ve been saying sorry a lot this week. It’s the first week of teaching of term 3, and I’m feeling stretched to my limit. Just when one email gets answered about showing a film in class tomorrow, another one comes in from someone who has only just started putting their course resources together and needs help with the software Right This Minute. The students are waiting! Assignments rely on the content! Project work that I have barely kept up with over August is still happening, still asking things of me that I have not finished (and in some cases not started). And I have a welcome presentation that I need to get slides done for. And through all this is the sorry – trying to communicate my busy-ness and just holding on without coming across as pitying. But I am overwhelmed! And I do want people’s empathy! And patience!
This is all to say that I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, and give myself the space to stop saying sorry and feel like I am enough. At least for the length of a blog post if not for the rest of the day.
*checks email one more time to make sure nothing new has caught on fire*
What has worked?
I have left on time every day this week. Last week I worked 9 hours every day and then called in sick on Friday because I just couldn’t. I knew that if I did that again this week I would cry on the way to work every day. So I have left no later than my due 7 or 8 hours. And not checked any email outside of work time – there is only so much I can do away from my desk and occupying more of my free time with anxiety is not helping.
I booked leave for the coming weeks. I knew I would need to use up all this time in lieu I had been building up, but that it wouldn’t happen unless I scheduled it. So I booked in that time and some bonus annual leave days for some shorter weeks coming up that don’t rely on me calling in sick from exhaustion.
I walked for at least 20 minutes every day. One day it was a long lunch. Yesterday I got off the train 1 stop early and walked home. The sun has just come out so today I think it’s another lunchtime walk. There’s nothing worse than being tired and drained but not being able to sleep when you actually get into bed – and for me that means I need some movement in my day but I have to fight for that time. I have to put it in my calendar and not think of it as optional or movable.
What hasn’t worked?
I’ve been eating pretty poorly. Food will always be really hard for me. I know this is meant to be a professional space that I am cultivating but I don’t really know the point of that unless you can also let people be people. So I have food issues and stress brings them painfully to the fore. Today I am trying to get back on track by not focusing on it too much, and making a lot of better options for me available at hand. We’ll see how I go.
Sleep. It’s so hard to know how much I actually need when 8 hours never feels like enough. But then I think about it a bit more and really the 8 hours was whittled down pretty significantly by laying in bed composing emails in my head I didn’t have time to send, the cat waking me up at 2 and then at 4, and then waking up before my alarm. Now that there is more light as we head into Spring properly, I think I need to wake up earlier as earlier routines have helped with getting a more solid sleep in.
This last one is the weirdest one to write and share yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot and it will be something to keep working on as I don’t have a good answer to what to do about it. I was so overwhelmed on Monday that I cried (quite a lot) in front of my direct manager at the end of our regular catch up meeting. It was one of those cries that I just could not stop once it started – all the more because this manager was being nice to me and trying her hardest to comfort me. I was just at the end of my rope for the day and tired of pretending that I was okay and on top of things. I don’t know how to be truthful about this to any of the managers here. That our workloads are just so huge and sometimes that sucks in a way that you can’t fix with a to-do list. No amount of prioritising work helps when you have regular stuff pop up out of the blue that can and will derail what you could be working on at any time. Or when we are meant to be constantly developing ourselves in our profession, staying current and cutting edge, learning new skills, and also answering our phone whenever it rings. So this is a big WIP for me – knowing how to communicate that treading water is tiring and not getting so bogged down in how much there is to do that I can’t focus on any one thing to get done.
I set myself a timer to write this – and it’s almost up. It does help to get things down, and I hope I won’t regret the overshare. But it’s so painful not to share. I want a space to grow and reflect and share but I know I will have to crowbar it in to my life to really get it working. There will be time and space for more reflection, and more writing in general, if I make time and space for posts like this. Done is better than perfect.