I spent most of last week at the lake at HP's rental cottage, the third time he's been so wonderfully generous as to let me use it after the end of the commercial rental season. I knew I needed a break--I've taken a few days off here and there but generally ended up using them to cram for midterms/finals, not just relaxing. So I did my best to try to do that last week.
I didn't realize until late in the week just how much I'd withdrawn over the last three months or so. I make friends easily and have tons of them, but am now aware of how poor a job I've made of being a friend lately. I owe several people apologies for being out of touch. The tank was almost completely empty, though...just getting through the day and getting everything done was as much as I could muster, and there wasn't a lot left for anything social.
Spending six days near the water, getting ten hours of sleep a night, reading a book that had nothing to do with school (and starting another), rediscovering knitting, and just sitting still in a seat that was not in front of a desk or a steering wheel were exactly, precisely what I needed. I came home able to look at the total body of things to do in front of me and identify what to attack first, then next, then next, and on and on. For someone who lives by lists, this sounds ridiculous, I know--but making a list and actually prioritizing it in a way that gets the majority of the items done and allows the non-critical crap to drop off until the next day/next week? A skill I'd forgotten in the crush of trying to get EVERYTHING done, EVERY day, PERFECTLY. Once I stepped back and realized a) I'm never going to finish every list every day, b) not everything on the list is high-priority, and c) there is definitely no way I will ever be in the same galaxy as perfection, everything started making sense again.
Don't go more than nine months without taking at least three days off to do absolutely nothing. It's not healthy. You'll just piss off your friends and eat yourself alive.
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