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Balancing Life, Sort Of.

28 Jan , 2016,
Heidi Kumm
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one comments

Some people seem to have that perfect balance of life — everything in order, everything at ease, everything balanced out. I am usually not that person. I prefer chaos. It’s harder to be upset about the outcome when you’re not really sure what to expect because you’re honestly not really sure what’s going on. All this chaos I let into my life is awesome — it’s energizing, it’s motivating and it’s exciting. It also makes planning difficult, which means my life very rarely has any sort of consistent structure. It is extremely difficult to balance anything in life when you are just bouncing from a motivated morning to an overworked afternoon without so much as a lunch break.

That’s what my life has been lately. There has been no balance. It has been pretty all or nothing. All the work hours, none of the running. All the running, none of the writing. All the working, none of the sleeping. All the eating, none of the laundry. All of the sleeping, none of the showering. I like this, it keeps me on my toes. But…it also really messes with my psyche.

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From that one time I got outside to run after work…because no one wants to see what my life looks like while I’m actually at work!

Last week, a few days shy of what became a 94 hours work week, I caught myself feeling guilty…for only working 10 hours one day. Ten hours. That’s overtime for the average American. That day alone pushed my week into more than 60 hours of work. Yet, I felt guilty for leaving work to run with friends. That’s where I let my head get this month…work started to trump fun time + free time + friend time. This needs to change. I like chaos; not guilt.

I’m working on abandoning some of the guilt that comes with ditching the office but my entire winter will be spent working an insane amount of hours. Until May I’m looking at 60-70 hour weeks, voluntarily. I’m not complaining and no one is making me do this. Some part of me does enjoy this type of schedule + the feeling of accomplishment that comes with keeping my life together while working more than 90 hour in a week. Plus, this is only temporary, I’m doing all of this to give myself more freedom this summer…and to pay for the freedom I had last fall.

Proof that it’s all worth it — if it takes a few months of crazy long work weeks to give me the freedom to travel I have zero complaints!

At times I feel like I have no balance in my life, but really, I think I’ve just fashioned myself a “life scale” that’s much more like a rotating elevator — all the work for a few months, all the play for a few months, repeat. Again, this is intentional and I’m thriving much better than I expected to be. Of course, my poor season pass + snowboard will be lonely this winter while I focus on fitting long runs in with my long hours…but that’s more about sacrifice than balance.

1 Comment

  1. Patrice January 29, 2016 at 9:31 pm Reply

    Sounds like you have it planned out and will celebrate later! But, hopefully you get a little break here and there … especially with all the snow coming our way!!

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