Balance of Work and Writing et cetera
Writing
Balance of Work and Writing et cetera
Writing

Balance of Work and Writing et cetera

I’m feel­ing pretty over­whelmed these days. I don’t know if I’m wear­ing too many hats, or if I’m not man­aging my time well enough, or if I’m simply overthink­ing things and look­ing for stuff to worry about. 


I have this job that has turned into way more than it was sup­posed to, and I still don’t have assur­ance yet that I’m going to be com­pensated for the extra work. 

I’m dir­ect­ing a music­al. I’ve been in lots, but I’ve nev­er dir­ec­ted one, and I’m feel­ing a little out of my ele­ment. There’s that nig­gling feel­ing of being out of con­trol. There’s that weight of know­ing that lots of people are count­ing on me yet only a hope that things will come togeth­er and fall into place. I don’t do well with poor atti­tudes, so to have kids com­plain about their parts, or show any signs of lack of com­mit­ment really ticks me off. What I want to do is yell at them, but because I can­’t do that and it takes too much time to explain to them why they should­n’t do what they’re doing or say what they’re say­ing, I mostly just brush them off, and I don’t know if any mes­sage is get­ting through. My won­der­ful music­al dir­ect­or is much bet­ter at deal­ing with that stuff. I DO have cool ideas of how to stage it, but I don’t know how much the kids are cap­able of… I know they’ll sur­prise me and be cap­able of all sorts of things… Maybe it’s just that things are still early. Once we get up on our feet and start block­ing things may start to make sense.

Then there’s my writ­ing. I am com­mit­ted to mak­ing room for it in my sched­ule, but as I said, work is seep­ing in where I did­n’t expect it to. So far, most of the days I have set aside for writ­ing have been at one point inter­rup­ted by a need to deal with some­thing work-related. I try to keep breath­ing and stay­ing calm and turn­ing the dial back to writ­ing, and have been suc­cess­ful to a point: it takes time though, and is frus­trat­ing to not be able to com­pletely focus on it. I know that it’s par­tially my fault for choos­ing to deal with work things. But here again is that know­ledge that oth­ers are count­ing on me. It’s a tough call.

Everything would be bet­ter if I could only sleep past 5am!

[At the Sur­rey Writers’ Con­fer­ence in Octo­ber some friends and I were dis­cuss­ing the word ‘only’. Evid­ently it is the most fre­quently mis­used word in the Eng­lish lan­guage. Now I get all wor­ried every time I use it! Did I do it right? Oh no! What if I’ve used it incor­rectly! Oh well, the sky has­n’t fallen yet.]