Excessive Busyness

I've spent so much of my life multi-tasking and always keeping busy that when faced with an unscheduled block of time, I balk. I am a person who needs a decent amount of structure, so I tend to invent it for myself. On Wednesdays, I do x and y, on Thursdays, this or that, etc. Otherwise I feel like I'll get swallowed up in the void.

But is that such a bad thing? To have nothing to do? To do nothing? That's meditation, and I "do nothing" every day and it grounds me a bit more in this life so I'm not flitting around in the past and the future.

When I'm teaching, I am in the moment. There's no other place to be! You can't be thinking about anything else except what's going on in your immediate environment. I love teaching.

But I also burn myself out teaching, as I mentioned in yesterday's post. The mania starts to kick in and I'm ready to start an entire drama program at a school I only started volunteering at twice a week three months ago. Whoa, Nelly.

I can't seem to help fast forwarding and making grand plans that will be impossible to keep. I just started looking at job postings yesterday. I don't know that I'm ready to go back to work, but at least I'm looking. I have a hard time figuring out what's handleable and what's not. I went so far in one direction when I tried to change the world teaching preschool last year that I'm wary of over committing or making promises I can't keep. My condition has me second guessing myself because some days I'm fine, some days I'm hypomanic, and some days I'm so depressed I want to stay in bed all day. It's like being a ball in a pinball machine, bouncing from one emotion state to the next, and hoping like hell I can keep my hands on the flippers to keep my ball in play.

And play on I will. I must. I must learn to be okay with silence, stillness. I must learn to be okay with not "being something"--making my identity through work like most people in Western Civilization do. "I'm a ___doctor/lawyer/receptionist_______" is the mantra of most workers in this world. Right now I'm a me. That's about it. And that needs to be enough.