(65) Productivity

I’m grappling with the reality that it is officially mid summer, and I have accomplished maybe 50% of the shit I wanted to get done. Oh wait. Ok, so I’ve had some wines (LIE: i’ve had gin with a splash of prosecco and solerno liquor) and basically mid summer and 50% is damn good. It’s right the fuck on schedule. Which basically means my whole post (meeping about how motivation is exactly like a 69 in that both involved additional blow jobs just to get on the list of things worth experiencing) doesn’t even math-wise make sense. Ok then.

I had four main things that I wanted to do this summer. Two of them were starting projects, and two of them were maintaining. Weirdly, I’ve been maintaining like a champ. ? Lookit me, adulting and stuff. The two starting projects are…not imperative, but really fucking good ideas for me. And during the season/school year, my life will be much more metered and it will become inarguably important that I get actual sleep bc less axe murdery. The problem is when I think of actually adding in the time each of those new projects would take (neither of them involve making money immediately), I am confronted with four maintenance projects and none of them are small feats for me. The two that I’m currently maintaining are weird and new and kind of alarming already.

One of my shallowest learning curves is how much processing and unwinding I need in order to be clear headed during my tasks. In college, I would bop from thing to thing, often for 18 hours straight each day, every day, for many days (months!) in a row. I would have burnouts, of course, but they lasted a week or so, and then I was back in, all fire and no waiting. I graduated, ass planted into bills and not being enough of a human to warrant health insurance (remember pre-existing conditions? yeah, i nearly died OOPS did i make it awkward with a political slant? here’s a cactus for your privileged discomfort. hump it. #gins), and wound up in a derelict little town best known as Perpetual Burnout, or, more aptly, ‘fuck this particular reality that exists only because our country is broken in ways that happen to directly and immediately affect me’.

I couldn’t go for 18 hours at a time. For many years, the stress of having no buffer, of possibly starving to death or not getting medical care/drugs, and begging to be taken in by my family because, according to the ever popular boot strap myth, I was an utter failure at life, was an actual, time-consuming, energy-sucking hobby. I had a couple 15 hour stints here and there, and both of those extravaganzas wiped me out for weeks. I would attend work and practice in name only; I went through the motions, but I couldn’t be present, because the me that put passion and color and texture and light into the things that I loved, wasn’t as thrilled at the ‘opportunity’ to do so anymore.

I eventually learned to put space between my commitments. I need an hour between a long stint of teaching or a long string of rehearsals. I can’t do a double (or triple) rehearsal wedged in between four hours of teaching (I have before. It’s a hot fucking disaster mess smushed between two squealing denial boogers I often refer to as my ears). I can’t do a performance after six hours of teaching, another playing gig, and one, lonely, long overdue, hour of practice. Some people can; I get tired and miserable, and my work is less. Maybe not to others, but to me. It is less, and I hate myself every time I let it happen. So, I learned to put space in there. To be adamant about what I want in my schedule; to set unquestionable and unapologetic boundaries with my time (ahem; my sanity).

It’s been slow and fraught. And is maybe why I have lagged on adding in another project. Here’s what, though: I will buffer my expectations of these two noobie projects before they become dicey pimples on the forehead of my productivity. I would love to be less prone to burnout. Possibly that lies in a healthy relationship between the description of my goals and my understanding of that description. (I realize I make up that description. hush. I’ve had wines. *gins. shut up.)