I don’t know many people who say, “Oh yeah, sure! I have all that free time!” I’m pretty sure that everyone I know is balancing work, family, friends, a project of some kind and their own recharge/slack time. I find it far too easy to fall into a pattern where I judge the quality of busy-ness. Thankfully, thoughts thoughts don’t often get the better of me, but it happens…
Take, for instance, my class mates. They frequently say they are too busy to get their part of an assignment completed. They cite their other class (or classes) and a family obligation of some sort, and I do my best to appear clinically neutral.
What i want to do is engage in a futile pissing contest. I want to scream, “oh! I’m just balancing a full class load, a difficult case load and your bullshit files!” That wouldn’t accomplish anything, let alone make me feel better.
I had Hoped that After years of working with difficult clients and families, I would have more resilience that passive-aggressive comebacks, but lately, that’s all I have. And sadly, I don’t think I’m alone.
Busy and just plain out of resilience.
What is there to do?
I have a few ideas, not the least of which is helping people (and myself) learn to cope. First and foremost, I think this:
It’s okay to be overwhelmed, distant, upset or sad. It’s okay to be mad at a friend, coworker or your country. What matters most is how we act. Most of all, we need to be okay with ourselves.
I think that’s key. And I think I have a post for tomorrow.
Yea, I mean, everyone thinks they are busy. No one wants to admit that what they’re doing isn’t enough.
If it’s a grad class, there’s no excuse to not have part of a project done. That’s ridiculous. I think part of the issue is that a lot of undergrads graduated with nowhere to go and so grad school for them has become something of undergrad 2.0.
What’s weird about college is that you sleep so much later into the day. It makes you a piece of shit, but that’s the only possible reason for feeling busy if you’re just a student–you are operating on a time deficit.