You Can't Do It All
If you aren’t already completely flaccid at that grasping title- hello, welcome, come pull up a chair. I promise this is meant to be comforting.
I am not here to be a Debbie Downer. I am here to tell the straight up truth!
The biggest hack to adult hood, I am slowly finding, as I finish out the home stretch of 39- is that we literally cannot do it all.
So give up trying to act like you can. (Thats directed directly to me!)
Now, yes, we can do it all- we can do things like change industries at 60 years old, or take an acting class as a bored 35 year old trying to make new friends, or set a goal to travel to every baseball stadium in the US- on a macro playing field, the world is your oyster. I encourage you, life is short, try to do it ALL.
But down here on a day-to-day micro level?
Give it up. Let go! It won’t happen.
For example, do you ever try to do the mental contortions of trying to fit more things than you have time and energy for, into one day?
You cant come out the other end without being either extremely late, exhausted, disappointed, or having accidentally let someone down, usually yourself.
You cannot get up at the crack of dawn, exercise exactly how you would like, take a luxury girl shower, fully dry and style your hair, walk into your closet like your Cher in Clueless and walk out like you are Kate Moss walking down a Paris runway, then be early for work, show up firing on all cylinders for every second of your work day, have a leisurely gossipy girl lunch while also managing to not fall behind and get all of your work done, end the day feeling completely caught up, before making a stop by at a happy hour, running and getting that dry cleaning, picking up a birthday present for that party you have on Thursday, and then making it home at a reasonable hour to cook a healthy meal, fold that load of laundry, spend quality time with the person or people you live with, chat on the phone to that long distance friend, clock 10,000 steps, all while cleaning your kitchen, making a cup of tea, revisiting some emails, replying to the 52 texts you acquired across multiple group chats suddenly deciding to all plan trips when you stepped away from your phone to pee, lighting a candle, putting your phone up, doing your 57 step skincare routing and getting in bed before 10pm so you can get a solid nine hours!!!!!!!!!!
YOU CAN’T DO IT.
If you are doing that, you are either one of two things- permanently on adderall, or totally avoiding something. Or both.
Notice that example did not include anything to do with children- mostly because, I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE LIKE AND I DONT KNOW HOW PARENTS DO IT! I think women who have kids and work full time and still manage to wear matching clothes and form complete sentences have serious super powers. They should have special lanes on the highway just for them. They should get to go Target during special hours and not have to stand in line.
The point of all of this is. Give it up. Say no. Be realistic with yourself. Take something, or on certain days, take multiple things off of your plate. Cave.
Relax on the couch without cleaning the whole kitchen first.
Let the clean laundry pile up on the guest bed on the weeks you are overwhelmed.
Forfeit the workout to do the admin you’ve been putting off.
Or put the admin aside to workout for your mental health.
Don’t answer a call that you know is going to jeopardize the next hour of your life when all you feel like doing is laying on the floor.
Be gentle to yourself on the days where you wanted to accomplish five things but only had energy for one and a half.
Run two errands instead of five, then go celebrate with a fun drink and let the sun hit your face and just relax and say, we are all molecules floating in space and nothing even matters!
No one is doing it all. I can’t be the only one driving around with Amazon returns in a bag in her back seat that never made it to UPS and have long since passed their drop off date. Cringe. But also, who cares. I will survive without getting my $32 refund, and Goodwill will happily welcome the unused house address numbers I ordered in the wrong size. If I ever get there.
Life is too short, and somewhere over the past century we (mostly American’s) subconsciously reprogrammed ourselves that unless we are pushing ourselves to our absolute limits, and ending each day on a literal 15% energetic battery, we are not doing enough.
Just take a Saturday. Last Saturday, after coming off of a week of traveling, then being catapulted right back into the work week- I was looking forward to Saturday to reset my life- aka do all the errands I could not fit in all week. That included finding the perfectly sized gift box for a gift I had to Fedex, picking up things at the tailor, doing a Target reset (stocking up on paper towels, toilet paper, cotton balls and various other household necessities), grocery shopping, getting gas, making it to Fedex before they closed to ship the gift from bullet one. Oh, and I had shit to return to the mall.
In my mind I said, this should only take a few hours. And then when I found myself two hours in, still not having found the gift box, driving across town to yet another store, damning myself for not having ordered it on Amazon all week, I had to have a little level set with myself and say- what are you doing? Some of this can be done tomorrow, or Monday, or not at all. Go home and relax, because that is all you really want to do!
So thats the message. Relax. It can all be done tomorrow. And if you never get to it? Spoiler alert, life goes on.