Working from home is wild in that you’re always home. When the workday is over, it’s sort of this anticlimactic transition to nowhere. You can’t pack up and go home because you’re already there. Don’t be fooled, you were working at work. And maybe you got some laundry done or painted that spot in the breezeway or vacuumed up the never ending supply of dog hair in between whatever income-generating work it is you actually do from home. You feel accomplished, taking care of all that home shit and work shit and maybe you deserve a reward. Only instead of leaving the home from which you also work, your go-to reward is gleefully Havishamming around that very same house in various states of being, tinkering here, tchotchke-ing there. Inevitably all this being at home catches up with you and you begin to wonder if maybe you’re not being social enough, even though you’re probably being the regular amount of social, but you feel so hermit-y because it feels like you’re ALWAYS home, because you kinda definitely are. 

If we’re talking about the 1:1:1 work|sleep|personal time pie of life, I’m technically home by default 16 of the 24 daily allotted hours. And if you’ve ever owned a home, how does shit get done if you don’t spend time doing it? There goes four more. So at least 20. Twenty of 24 hours a day, I am at home. Which is why I’ve turned it into the museum that it is and enjoy spending my free time Havishamming it to pieces. And I do appreciate the suggestion of going somewhere else to work, but have you met my dog? No chance I’m choosing not to spend time with him if given the opportunity. He’s got such a short life.

| Actual footage of me working from home. Yes, that’s the stool I sit in. |

So yeah this is on me to figure out, and booooy do I. Every time. In a weak moment of extreme motivation, I look up every single venue within like 300 miles to see what’s on the agenda for the next three months and boldly purchase tickets to EVERYTHING (occasionally two, someone’s bound to want to drive to Chicago and back on a Sunday night, right?), killing all the birds with one stone, combining road trips + family + friends + camping + music + dogs. I pen everything neatly into my paper planner like Brett Kavanaugh (paper calendars never lie, according to my crisscrossed, white-outed daily boxes) but halfway through this grand and evil plan, my social tolerance peters out. Comes to a halt. Evaporates. Disintegrates? Instead of looking ahead at the colorfully filled days feeling excitement and gratitude, I dread the approach.

On September 11, 2024, I panicked about not having enough time left in the month to write because I was doing TOO MANY THINGS. And I know this is just a self-imposed deadline, but I made it for a reason and if I can’t keep my word to myself, WHO EVEN AM I?? So I obviously had to write about not having any time to write so I could stop feeling so anxious and avoid canceling all the things because the cancellations had already started. Before I deleted my entire future, I put down the whiteout and looked ahead day by day. Did I really have so many things to do, or did the things I had to do just feel like so … much?

I have massive amounts of anxiety to seize the day, EVERY DAY, make the best! of each one, particularly in summer when the days are long and the sunlight is taunting. Summer is dope for a few weeks until it jumps in the lake and tries to drown me with a reverse seasonal depression bear hug. What I really want to be doing most of the time is hibernating without feeling guilty for not doing all the things. Or as I said to Tessa on Marco Polo, which is often used as a platform for us to safely straighten out our thoughts:

I want it to get darker faster. I want fall to be here. I want there to be less pressure of things to do. I want there to be some things to do, just not too many things to do. You know what I mean? I want just the right amount of things to do. I want the Goldilocks amount of things to do. Everything. Just. Right…. I’m just feeling very overwhelmed for no reason. I don’t even have kids. Or like, a husband…or much responsibility at all. And I feel this way? I can’t imagine how regular people do it.

Whenever I complain to my sister, I’m overly cognizant of how much more she has on her plate.

Have you read that article about how your body ages in two major spurts, at 44 and 60? I did. So part of me feels like I have to squeeze everything into these next five months before my previously unknown imminent demise. But the other part of me flipping calendar pages knows that in three days time, we enter Goldilocks season. The first day of autumn. When everything slows down, takes a deep breath and burrito rolls into cozy.

See you on the other side.