The Mad Minstrel

We spend an awful lot of time trying to recover from our own lives.

We work all week and spend the weekend recovering from work. We overbook ourselves and then cancel plans because we’re exhausted. We drag ourselves through obligations, relationships, family events, errands, appointments, birthday parties, laundry, grocery shopping, and whatever else we’ve somehow decided responsible adults are supposed to be doing at all times. Then, when we finally get a few hours to ourselves, we collapse on the couch and stare at our phones.

Because we need to recharge.

I’ve been thinking about that word lately. Recharge. Like we’re phones. Like the goal is to plug ourselves into the couch for eight hours on Sunday so we can get our battery back up to 73% before Monday morning comes around and starts draining it again.

And sure, sometimes you really do need to lie on the couch and do absolutely nothing. I fully support doing absolutely nothing. It’s one of my favorite things to do. But I’m starting to wonder if there’s a difference between resting and recovering.

Because ideally, I don’t want a life I need to recover from.

I don’t mean that I expect life to be easy. That would be ridiculous. I have a job. I’m a wife. I’m a mother. I have a house that apparently requires cleaning no matter how many times I have already cleaned it. There are appointments and obligations and dishes and people who need things from me.

Life takes energy.

But there are also things we allow into our lives that take far more energy than they should.

For a long time, I had friendships like that. People I genuinely cared about. People I considered friends. But sometimes I would see their name come up on my phone and feel anxious before I even answered. Not because I didn’t like them.

Because I knew … I knew the phone call wasn’t going to be a quick hello. I knew something was wrong. I knew they needed something emotionally from me, and I knew that whatever I had been doing for the next hour or two was no longer what I was going to be doing. And that’s a difficult thing to admit about someone you care about. It feels selfish.

Friends are supposed to be supportive.

Family is supposed to be there for each other.

Good employees are supposed to be helpful.

Good parents are supposed to show up.

Good spouses are supposed to make time.

…

Good people apparently have endless amounts of emotional availability and also remember everyone’s birthday without having to be reminded by social media..

I have yet to meet one of those people, but I assume they’re very tired.

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten better at boundaries. Not good at them. Better.

I’ve had to set boundaries with friends. With family. With work. Sometimes those boundaries hurt people. Sometimes they made me feel guilty. Sometimes they made me wonder if I was being selfish.

But somewhere along the way I started realizing that constantly exhausting myself for other people wasn’t actually making me a better person. It was just making me exhausted.

And now I’m working on a different kind of boundary: making room for myself. Which turns out to be surprisingly difficult once you’re a wife and a mother and an employee and approximately 47 other things. I’ve started getting up at 5 in the morning to write. Is this ideal? Absolutely not. Five in the morning is a terrible time. Nothing good should happen at five in the morning. But right now, it’s mine.

The house is quiet. My kid is asleep. Nobody needs breakfast. Nobody is asking me a question. Nobody at work is emailing me. And for a little while, I get to write.

Technically, this costs me energy. I could sleep later, but writing gives something back to me and I think that’s the part we sometimes miss when we talk about balance. We make everything about rest. Take a break. Have a self-care day. Recharge.

But maybe balance isn’t about creating enough empty space to recover –
Maybe it’s about deciding what deserves the space in the first place.

Because we are very good at filling our lives. We keep up with the Joneses. We say yes because everyone else is going. We buy things because everyone else has them. We sign our kids up for things because everyone else’s kids are doing them. We stay busy because somehow being busy became evidence that we’re doing life correctly.

And when we aren’t busy, we stare at little glowing rectangles that are specifically designed to make sure we remain there as long as humanly possible. Then we wonder why we feel drained.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sitting on the couch and scrolling through your phone. I do it. Sometimes after a long day, that is exactly the level of consciousness I have available, but distraction isn’t rest; it’s coping. So sometimes we aren’t recharging, we’re hiding.

And I’m increasingly interested in building a life I don’t want to hide from

Not some perfectly balanced Instagram life where I meditate at sunrise and drink something green and my child willingly puts on his own shoes (although that would be amazing … actually, I want that one, I do. If someone knows how – let me know!).

I want my actual life. A messy life. A life where work is sometimes stressful and parenting is sometimes exhausting and marriage takes attention and friends need things and dishes regenerate overnight through some process science has yet to explain. But also a life where the things that matter to me are allowed to matter.

…

My family. My marriage. Writing. Friends who leave me feeling loved instead of depleted. Time alone. Time together. Things that make me feel like myself, and I think getting there requires occasionally asking an uncomfortable question:

Why am I doing this?

Not everything has to bring me joy. Please do not Marie Kondo your electric bill. But if something consistently makes you miserable, anxious, resentful, exhausted, or desperate to escape, maybe it deserves a second look.

Maybe the answer is a boundary. Maybe the answer is saying no. Maybe it’s leaving your phone in another room. Maybe it’s scheduling a date night. Maybe it’s getting up at an ungodly hour because there’s something you love doing and that’s the only damn hour nobody else has claimed yet.

None of this is easy! Sometimes we genuinely don’t have choices. There are jobs we need because mortgages exist. There are people we care for because they need us. There are periods of life where balance is less of a graceful equilibrium and more of a desperate attempt to keep all the plates from hitting the floor.

But even then, I think it’s worth figuring out which plates are actually ours – because these are our lives. Not the things we have to get through before the weekend. Not something we should regularly need to escape. Not five days of depletion followed by two days desperately trying to become functional again. THAT’S NO WAY TO LIVE.

We’re going to be tired sometimes. Probably a lot of the time, but we should hit the weekend feeling just tired, not tired and wanting to run away.