The Future is No Place to Place Your Better Days

I've written here about how I've struggled with feeling overwhelmed, and how I've struggled to find the joy in every day.  I know a lot of it has to do with the stage of life I'm in right now, with two young children - but they are growing out of the age that is so horribly hard, and yet I'm still trying to find my balance.  I don't want to wake up in 15 years and have two kids getting ready to leave home and wonder why I didn't enjoy their childhood more.

A few months ago I listened to the audio version of Shonda Rhimes' memoir "The Year of Yes" and felt inspired by the renewal and joy she found from her year spent saying Yes to things that scared her.  Then this week I read "Loving My Actual Life" a memoir about the author's 9 month experiment to try to find more joy and meaning in her every day life.  Not as fabulous a read, but still interesting to follow her journey.

Naturally, I'm now thinking about my creating own challenge to help me get myself back on track - to reboot my life.  The thing is, I can't think of changes I'd like to make that fit into neat categories that I can tackle a month at a time.  Likewise, there's no one overarching theme (like saying yes to things that scare me) that I could use to tie it all together.  But there is the constant low level stress and aggravation from the clutter and utter lack of organization in my home - when I think of changes, this is all I can focus on. It's a project I've been working on for months and I've made a dent (including getting my entire downstairs redecorated last month) but there is still so much to do, and I've reached the point where it's going to take a lot more than an hour here and there to get it done.  And I just can't seem to get past the point of writing a list of all I need to do.

I've spent this past week, on my vacation in Florida visiting my parents, thinking about what's been standing in my way of actually putting my plans into action, and it embarrassingly comes down to one thing: Facebook.  I've used it for distraction for years, and since I recently became a member of a physician mommy group on there, it's even worse.  I'm certain I waste hours on it every week, maybe even every day.

Which means that step one in my life reboot is that I'm going to take a break from Facebook for the next month, starting Monday when I'm back to work.  (I will make a small exception for the Facebook group that has been created for the kindergarten families in my neighborhood, but I can set that up with email notifications to limit my time on FB.)

I'm going to use the time I'm off Facebook to devote focused energy at night to home organization and decluttering.  By the end of the month I should have a huge chunk that enormous project done - and I'm hoping once I'm nearing the end of it, I'll have a better idea of what's the next step to help me best enjoy the life I'm living now.

I've decided that I'm very specifically not giving up all social media - not Instagram and not blogs.  Instagram has become my favorite time capsule - I love being able to go back and see my favorite moments from the past few years just by scrolling through my own IG feed, and it only takes up a few minutes of my day to see what everyone I follow is up to. (If you're on IG and I don't follow you, share your user name here so I can add you!)  Plus there's the nice side effect of just feeling good from reading IG, while I've found that lately FB often leaves me angry or annoyed or disgusted with humanity.

I'm not sure if this is going to be a short project or a long term project, but as I mentioned in my last post, it's at least another year before I can cut my hours back at work, and at least two more years of staying in my current job.  I can't wait around for better days, I need to do something different now.