I’ve been thinking a lot this week about my inability to take a break. I’m in a really good spot with almost all my final projects for the semester and I keep finding these pockets of time that I don’t know what to do with. I was filling it with watching my most recent obsession, Only Murders In The Building. But once that ended I was faced with time I felt a desperate need to fill with something productive. Because even when I was watching OMITB I was paying attention to the filming decisions and felt productive in every season I finished. After a wave of successes ending with my book journey being posted to Lafayette’s Instagram, it felt important to me that I was doing something for myself completely unrelated to my professional interests.

But it’s hard for me to take a break because there are so many things I want to do. And there are so many networking opportunities for me to get to that. It’s hard to feel secure in picking just a few. So I’ve been applying to a bunch of internships for the summer. And as I’ve said before I’ve been applying to graduate schools. Which! Exciting news! I got accepted into one of my top choices! But in order to feel sustained for those things I need to take a real break. So I started thinking of some ideas and how to hold myself accountable. One of the ways I’ve held myself accountable professionally has been issuing myself challenges and posting them to my Instagram. That way if I don’t resolve the challenge by posting it’ll make me feel worse than actually doing the thing. So I’ve decided I’m going to try my hand at cooking for myself more. I don’t know how to cook many things but I do know that when I cook my brain completely turns off. And that’s what I need. I briefly entertained yoga but I can’t focus my brain enough to be silent when I’m given time to think. I can’t even do that before I go to bed. So I’m gonna try and cook at least one new recipe a month. And we’ll see how it goes but I just want to be intentional about how I use my time to rest. I’m only just beginning and I don’t want to be burnt out before I get there. I want to start now getting into the habit of working hard and resting well.

That’s about all the updates I wanted to share for now. I’ve concluded THE DEPTHS tour and am starting a new era. The last chapter of An Archive of Adolescence and I want to be rested well enough to celebrate it. So here’s to closing the year with long weekends on the couch. Or something like that.