2020 - Progress, Not Perfection

It has been a few years since I made a New Year's resolution.  In 2017, I resolved to say no to more things, which obviously wasn't enough given the burnout I hit in 2019.  In 2018, I seem to have been in a bit of a dark place in which I thought resolving to do anything was futile, because I wouldn't be able to stick to it anyway.

The past two years have shown me that, under the right circumstances, I can actually make pretty big changes in my life.  In that time, I've greatly expanded and strengthened my social circle, to the point where I couldn't see everyone I wanted to during my two weeks of holidays.  I've started a (somewhat) daily meditation practice and gone to a meditation retreat.  I've been really consistent with yoga, going to 45 classes in the first half of the year and 83 in the second half*.  I've adopted an intuitive eating practice, which has led me to a much healthier relationship with food (and overall healthier eating habits) than I've had in my life.  And I've cut back on my work responsibilities to the point where I am only slightly dreading returning to it tomorrow.

When I look back at the changes I've made, the keys for me have been twofold:  motivation and gradual progress.  I haven't made changes out of a sense that it's what I should do, but rather because I can see how the changes will make me happier and otherwise enhance my life.  The goals I set for myself are personal and are aligned with my values, not things that other people think are important.  I've also started slowly with things (It took me over a decade to develop a regular yoga practice!) and allowed myself to learn from the process of change, rather than thinking that I'll be perfect at a new thing the moment I start it.  As Done By 40 said in a comment on my last post, "Progress, not perfection".

Looking ahead to 2020, my hope is to have a relatively uneventful year.  2019 was a year of tremendous growth and change, but it was also a hard one.  I kind of want to catch my breath**.  I want to continue with my mindfulness practice, and I'm aiming for a regular practice of four yoga classes per week and meditating every day.  I want to keep building on the friendships I have.  My financial situation is really good (No debt!  Lots of investments!), and I mostly just want to keep working and hoarding money for the future.  Overall, I don't anticipate any radical changes in 2020***.

But....in 2020, I would like to work on keeping up with everything.  I feel like I'm perpetually behind - on housework, on work work - and I find it draining.  I hate having clutter in my home and 100 dictations to sign off on in my inbox.  I hate feeling like I'm perpetually catching up, only to have new work pile on top of me the moment I finally get through the old work.  And it's not like I'm saving time by procrastinating on things - I have the same amount of work to do, regardless of whether I do it right away or put it off for weeks.

Which...is really everyone's problem, right?  While the specific tasks may differ, I think we all have an endless to-do list that is never done to our satisfaction.  So, while I'm setting this as a goal, I am also trying to be realistic.  And to extend a lot of grace and compassion to myself.  Because no matter how hard I work, I am never going to get to the bottom of the list.  And I need to make peace with that.

As far as how to do this...I'm going to experiment.  Try something for a while, see how it goes, then keep it or reject it.  I'm not expecting that I will get to the end of the list by midnight tonight and then always keep up with it, forever and ever.  I know it will be a process, and so I'm trying to give myself the time and space (and lots of grace!) to work with the process.  For the moment, I am going to try three things that I think may help:

1)  Going to later yoga classes:  Some of my favourite yoga classes are at 5:30 PM, which unfortunately means leaving work at 4:30 and therefore losing out on a lot of potential work time.  I'm going to try sticking to a regular weekly schedule, with a 7 PM class as my earliest, so that I get an extra hour or so at work at the end of many days.

2)  Coming to work earlier:  My work days start between 8 and 9:30 am (sometimes 10 if I really let myself sleep in) depending on whether or not I have a morning clinic.  I'm going to try to get to work for 8 am consistently so that I'm getting some extra work time first thing in the morning.  As an added bonus, I'm hopeful that the more regular wake up/go to work schedule will be good for my insomnia.

I recognize that I'm proposing to both start later and finish later, which has the potential to simply be too much work.  But I'm hoping that this will allow me to get most, if not all, of my work done during the week, thus giving me weekends completely off to recharge.  I'll see how it goes...

3)  Just doing the shit now:  I'm human.  I procrastinate.  Sometimes epically.  Yesterday I logged onto a conference website, thinking it was the last day for early bird registration, and when I discovered that I still had two weeks, I logged off.  I did very quickly log back on and register for the conference (also booked my Airbnb like a superstar), but my initial impulse was to procrastinate for another two weeks.  I've already started trying to break myself of this habit, as I know it is a huge contributor to the piles of things to do that build up.  So I'm trying to just respond to the email, just put my dishes in the dishwasher, just put away the laundry that I've already folded (instead of it sitting on my dresser until the basket is empty), and just add the item to my grocery list (instead of cursing myself when I get home from the store without it).  Just.  Do.  The.  Shit.

Who knows if this will work.  I like some of the 5:30 yoga classes, so I might cave and go to them.  My bed is very comfortable, so I may sleep in.  Doing the shit gets tedious.  But I'm going to give it a try and see where it takes me.

Any suggestions as I try to get more on top of things in my life?

*At least.  I only track yoga classes for my main studio; I think I did another 10 or so at other studios over the year.

**I feel like I'm tempting the universe by typing this.

***Seriously, I feel like I'm baiting the universe with this post.

Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written

"The facts of this world seen clearly

are seen through tears;

why tell me then

there is something wrong with my eyes?

To see clearly and without flinching,

without turning away,

this is agony, the eyes taped open

two inches from the sun." - Margaret Atwood

Part of my girlfriend's job involves resettling Syrian refugees.  After experiencing almost unspeakable horrors in their home country, these people have now traveled halfway across the world to a foreign city searching for something better.  Which they don't always find.  The cold and the grey of a Canadian winter, even as it begins to melt into spring, isn't always inviting.  The residents of my city too aren't always welcoming towards more people who will need government support (more taxes on the already overtaxed) to establish themselves.  The low-income housing into which people are placed doesn't always match with the image of an affluent Canadian city.  Life here can be hard.

And so they talk.  They talk about many of the sad things from their pasts and about the disappointment that they don't leave the sadness behind when they physically leave their country.  They talk to my girlfriend, and she listens because she's a good person and can feel these people's need to unburden themselves, if only a little.  With each story, each heartbreaking story, some of the weight of their experience transfers from them to her.  Their loads lighten, hers becomes heavier.

And I see it in her.  I see it in how she laughs a little bit less and seems a little bit more distracted when we talk.  I see it when I awaken in the night, and she is already awake, her mind unable to rest.  And I know what it is like, to bear witness to the suffering of others, and to feel powerless.

And I wonder, how do we - the doctors, the nurses, the social workers, the myriad of helpers - stay intact?  How do we witness these things and not be destroyed by them?  How do we keep coming back, day after day, offering what little we have to offer, when all we see is the neverending need?

The Weekly Hiss and Purr - September 7 Edition

I knew from the beginning that I was unlikely to write a "Hiss and Purr" post every week, but I was hoping to do it a bit more frequently than monthly.  By comparison, slukettg at This Liminal Space has been writing her "Weekly Hiss and Purr" literally every week and has lapped me in a very short time.  (If you haven't read her recent post about substance abuse and privilege, you should do that now.  It's way better written and more important than anything I'm going to come up with today.)  I'm going to try to write these posts more often, as they're a relatively easy way to get some of my thoughts out and to keep up with the habit of blogging.  I don't, however, promise weekly.

The Hiss - Insomnia:

Insomnia has been a lifelong enemy of mine, and for some reason it has decided to be particularly bad lately.  Most nights I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and then I lie in bed afterwards for anywhere from one to three hours, completely awake.  On bad nights, the timing of falling back asleep corresponds to the timing of the cats crawling into bed, and then there is no additional sleep for me.  The interrupted sleep has left me profoundly tired - on Friday night, I started whining about needing to go to bed at 9 PM, which is very unusual for a night owl like me.

The strange thing is, I don't know why the insomnia is so bad.  Usually I suffer from insomnia when I'm under stress or unhappy about something, but I don't feel like either of those things are the case right now.  Yes, there is some stress associated with starting work as a real doctor, but it feels very mild compared to what I'd feared.  And I'm not unhappy!  I'm enjoying work even more than I had expected; the girlfriend and I have been doing lots of fun things in our spare time; and I'm getting better about avoiding the trap of staying up too late at night.  I just don't get it!

I've been exercising again recently (more about that later in the week), and I'm hoping that will help turn things around.  Because I'm tired of staring at the ceiling when I should be asleep!

The Purr - Long Weekends:

There is something so unbelievably luxurious about having three days off in a row.  I love having one day for fun things and one day for necessary things and then yet another day for whatever I choose to do.  This has been a particularly good long weekend, as we haven't had any weddings to go to (I am so done with weddings).  I've finished my book (more about Chasing the Scream in a future post), finished knitting my first sock (and started my second), introduced my girlfriend to Treme in honour of the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, played board games, tried four different hamburgers for Burger Week, and eaten an amazing celebratory dinner at my favourite tapas restaurant.  And it's not over yet!

At the moment, I'm still in pj's, and I'm keeping my girlfriend company while she makes zucchini loaf.  We have an oldies station playing in the background, and we're chatting about everything from the tragedy of the Syrian refuge crisis to the awkwardness of junior high.  It's everything I need in life.

Evening Routines

OMDG posted today about her challenge with evenings, which got me reflecting on my own evening routine since starting back at work.  When I was on holidays, my plans for my work evenings were very ambitious - cook tasty dinners with my girlfriend, clean the kitchen, take care of housework/paperwork, exercise, and read stimulating and erudite books.  Shockingly, the reality has been somewhat less impressive.  Despite not actually working that hard yet (I'm only working about half-time at the moment), I've been coming home mentally exhausted every day, and I haven't been able to motivate myself to do most of the things I would like to.

Currently, my post-work schedule looks something like this:

1)  Arrive home and dump all possessions (lunch bag, purse, backpack, jacket) in the front hallway.  Ignore voice in the back of my head that tells me that I should be putting things in the spaces I created for them.

2)  Cook dinner with my girlfriend.  This varies from spending 2-3 hours making an elaborate dinner (we love cooking) to BBQing hot dogs and eating potato chips from the bag.

3)  Spend way too much time on the computer.  Facebook, blogs, news, repeat.  I haven't mastered the art of turning off the computer when there is nothing good left to look at, so this eats up a lot of time.  On a good day, I write a blog post of variable quality.

4)  Watch something on Netflix with my girlfriend.  Lately we've been watching Human Planet, which is actually a decent and not entirely mind-numbing show, so it could be worse.

5)  Look at the stack of library books on my coffee table.  Decide it isn't worth the effort.  Possibly watch another Netflix show, usually of lower quality than Human Planet.

6)  Feel progressively more exhausted.  Resist the urge to go to bed like a reasonable human being.  Repeat item #3.

7)  Realize it's past my bedtime.  Rush around trying to make a lunch, pack my work bag, feed the cats, and do anything else that needs to be done.  (Feeding the cats is the only thing I consistently accomplish before bed, and that's only because they meow at me.)

8)  Finally get to bed much later than I should.  Realize that eight hours of restful sleep has become an impossible dream.

9)  Lie awake staring at the ceiling, regretting all of the things I didn't do.

This is something I need to work on, because evenings make up a lot of the quality time I have for myself and my girlfriend outside of work.  Looking back on this time of my life, I don't want Facebook and Netflix and a cluttered apartment to be my most vivid memories.

How happy are you with your evening routine?

In Need of Sleep

The past few nights I've found myself lying awake for hours on end, stressing about money and my return to work and anything else I could think about.  Despite the resultant fatigue, today I drove to the country to visit one of my closest friends from medical school.  While we ate cafe food and she nursed her wee babe, I poured out my anxieties and fears for hours.  She, a master listener, absorbed everything I said.  After I had exhausted my deep pool of insecurities, she said simply "It will all be okay".  And because she is always right, I knew it would be.

Now, back in the city, I feel lighter than I have in weeks.  My mind is slowing and my limbs are growing heavy, and it is time to give in to sleep.  I'm hoping it will be a good one.