busy bee

Right this moment we are  just waiting for the a-ok to get on the road for my first real vacation since June. It is probably the most I have ever needed a vacation in my life so far. What I am looking forward to most, other than walking on the beach and hearing the ocean and hanging out with some great friends, is actually just the 3 hour car ride. Trevor is driving, I’ve got my Radiolab podcasts all loaded up, and my books all packed – I am so ready for 3 blissful hours of sitting and doing nothing. NOTHING. Amazing.

I was telling someone the other night that I have been really busy lately. And they were like “lately?!?” – implying that I have been busy for a good long while, really.

This is not untrue. For the past year and a half I have been working (almost) full time and going to school part time. I guess it’s just that lately it’s seemed busier.

I have theories about this.

A lot has been going on at work – and getting us staffed right for the holidays has been a major stressor for me and has been ongoing since, oh, August. Partly because of the staffing and partly because of other issues, I have had a couple longer-than-usual work weeks here and there over the last few months as well. A couple weeks ago, I worked 13 days in a row. Blech.

I’ve also been trying to fit more, socially, into my life because I was starting to feel like it was just work – school – home, 24/7. And I’ve been meeting lots of new people who I want to get to know better, which takes some definite effort. While social outings make a good kind of busy, it’s still busy.

Mostly, though, I think it’s just a little bit of a burn-out issue. After all, issues at work come and go and there have certainly been other crazy worktimes over the last year and a half that I’ve dealt with better. And although it felt very much like I just worked, went to school, and slept, it would be untrue to say that this whole time I haven’t also been going out when I could. I think it just took me an impressively long time to burn-out. A year and a half, in fact.

But there’s really no stopping now. The other day, a friend of mine posted a quote on facebook, the gist of which was “sometimes you just have to keep going, even when it’s the last thing you want to do” – I’m feeling that right now. I’m proud of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve done, both at work and at school – and I am trying to let that pride carry me through to the end right now. Anyway, it’s not actually that I want to stop, I just want to to be done already – which are two different things, I think.