Busy Schedule

How the heck do I have time for everything? It’s a question I get asked a lot and that I am now asking myself more pointedly. Between a full-time, fast-paced, high-stress IT job, finishing my yoga teacher training certificate, teaching the odd dance workshops and yoga classes, blogging, working out, socializing, rehearsing for two plays at the Montreal Fringe Fest and coming up with movement choreography, freelancing with voice acting, getting back to people about designing their websites, cleaning the house, going through the pile of books I have decided I “need” to read, making time to practice piano and getting enough sleep… no kidding I’ve been stretched paper-thin, these days.

Last week it finally went over the top. I felt I was back where I was in 2005 when I had burnt myself completely out in trying to be a full time IT employee and a nearly fulltime dancer-choreographer. I had something to prove to myself, and I felt that if I really wanted it, I would need to relentlessly keep at dancing with the full load of a 9-5 job and not complain or give myself quarter. If I really desired  this I should be able to prove that I could hack it. I should be able to keep up with a schedule that other successful dancers had, however, I neglected to point out to myself that none of these dancers had a full-time IT job on top of it all.

I established a routine of working a full day, heading up to a three-hour choreography and practice session, and then back home to cook and eat dinner at 11pm – and repeat four times a week. Naturally, after a few months of this, I lost weight I should not have, I sported constant bags under my eyes, simple decisions seemed gargantuan to me, my project at work was going in circles and worst of all, I began to resent dance.

Upon realizing that I was pushing myself too hard and unnecessarily so, I decided to do the “unthinkable”: take some frickin’ time off. It had not occurred to me until a friend, and then my mother suggested this. Stopping all dance, taking some rest time off of work, and just taking care of self; everything else could wait, health could not. And so my healing began.

It took a couple months before I could get back into the studio, and even then I tried a different studio as the regular one still had too much of a “taint” of stress for me. Even going into crowded noisy places like Home Depot was too much of an assault on my senses and I would go into small panics. I was able to eventually get myself back to health, to overcome all these things, but in the end, the main lesson I learned was all about giving myself permission to move at whatever pace was appropriate for me, and who cares what everyone else is doing and how. I make my own rules governing me. When I returned to work, I allowed myself to work in 30-minute shifts, where I would concentrate for half an hour and just work, the rest of the time I allowed myself to relax and take a break, guilt-free. As I did this, I found I could do more and more chunks of 30-minute work intervals, and soon 30 minutes would expand to an hour. (Let me tell you, it’s amazing just how much work you can get done in a simple 30 minutes with zero distractions of email, msn or the vast internet. Who knew?! :) )

So last week, there I was again, in a small “not enough time” panic when trying to get my day done. My breathing was short and stunted, a perma-knot in my stomach, and I rushed everywhere. I very quickly dropped or postponed a bunch of activities, cancelled some meetings, and scheduled in some non-negotiable time to do absolutely nothing but maybe eat and watch tv.  I stopped putting pressure on myself to try to make every single minute of a day “count”. It’s good to know that I now have the quick reflex to drop the non-essential, relax and take it easy on myself.  Tonight I have nothing planned, and I plan for it to stay that way.  I can breathe now.