Reset! RESET!

So, I took a few days off from work – two on either side of my usual day off, making it a FIVE DAY WEEKEND, YO! And I may have mentioned that but didn’t really want to make a big deal of it – I hate, hate, hate the word “staycation”, and didn’t want to see it peppering my blog. I don’t know why I hate it so. Partly a butchering of the language, partly resentment that I can’t afford to take an actual vacation, partly that it implies (or recognizes) that we live in a culture where we actually need to take time off of work in order to take care of shit around the house.

And that’s really what I needed; time off from work to clean my house and my mind. Time to restore my mental health, hit that mental reset button.

Don’t get me wrong – especially if you’re one of my customers, or friendstomers – I love what we do with all my heart and I do not want to be doing anything else. But life, since September, has been crushingly heavy. I am stressed out all.the.time; always worried – more than usual, and let me tell you that “usual” is already  “an awful fucking lot” anyway – about money, about income, about lack of income, about how the shop is doing, about how classes are going, about whether all the construction around us will kill the shop, about the health of my pets, about my own health… and it seems like the more I worry and fuss, the less I take care of myself. And the less I take care of myself, the less I can see that I’m not taking care of myself, because I always tend to put myself behind everything else anyway. It’s sad when you can lie to yourself and say that lighting some incense, playing Farmville, and drinking coffee is “taking care of oneself”. Sure, that’s fun – and part of taking care of oneself is having fun – but it’s not priming the pump that produces the volume of energy that I regularly give out to others during a typical day. I need other things for that, things that I haven’t been doing because it’s easy to tell myself I’m too busy or that I can’t afford it.

So I needed a few days off, especially before Sharon goes on vacation and I have some long days at the shop ahead of me, to reset my head. I got some acupuncture. I got some chiropractic work. I have more of both of those things planned. I spent some time with family. I cleaned up around the house. I threw some shit out. I did some laundry and didn’t fold it and tried not to berate myself for not folding it when it really was just fine sitting on the dresser in a heap anyway. I knit some, although more for classes and shop knitting than for personal reasons. I looked at flowers. I went for walks. I did some self-evaluation.

The end result? I need to take better care of myself. I need to find some ways to put myself first. I need to keep pressing that mental reset button.