My life moves to a very odd beat.
Some weeks it’s fast, so fast, my head-is-only-just-above-the-water fast. Other weeks it’s slow. Too slow. I find myself back on my emails doing work out of hours, kind of slow.
If my life was a see-saw, it would rarely hover level. It would fall to one side, and then fall to the other, and then back to the other again. It flops from side to side, the weight of each end depending totally on whether I am all in my social life, or all in my work.
There’s no time for in betweens, no time for living my best life, only time for extremes.
Because here’s the thing: I work a funky week.
Like so many others who have weird hours, who do shift work, who don’t identify with the 9-5 grind but instead a different grind altogether, my weekend falls on Monday and Tuesday. I work through the normal weekend, my work week going from Wednesday through to Sunday.
And although for the most part the days don’t bother me, it’s interesting how working through the weekend has such a fundamental impact on the state of my mind. There are weekends when I will fill my nights socially, backing up for work the next day and hating myself for the days to come as I enter recovery mode. And then there are the other weekends: the ones I keep quiet, the ones I hermit, the ones I drop the ball socially on. And then, of course, there’s the inevitable boredom I feel in the days to come, lamenting my inability to get up, get out and get going socially in the middle of my work week.
It’s a fine balance. And I almost never hit it.
So, like all good dilemmas festering in my mind, I vented to my colleagues about it. How can I get it right, when I always feel like I’m getting it wrong? How do I level the see-saw, when it’s almost always digging into either side of the ground?