No longer lurching from crisis to crisis: a commitment

Warning: this is a really personal post, which may be helpful to some with similar difficulties, but if you want to back away now and come back for bookishness on Friday, no hard feelings :)

OK, here's the thing: I've been pretty busy lately and have put lots of things on hold 'until I've done x' or 'until things calm down'. I've only just realised that I've been doing this now for at least a year (yeah, I know - and probably a year's a rather conservative estimate, if I'm honest). This behaviour is not good for my mental
health - depression and anxiety are generally not helped by lurching along from crisis state to crisis state.

So, here, for your benefit - although I'm sure you're more clued up than I am - are my liberating realisations:

• I've been consistently busy, although with different and varied projects, for a long time now: I should see busy as normal
• If busy is going to be my normal state, I need to see this as my actual life, not preparation (sorry for the dramatic, but I bet some of you know what I mean!)
• Staring at a screen for ten hours is far less productive than doing, say, six or seven hours of screen time spread across the day



How could I have been neglecting this?

• Not only can I therefore 'afford' the time to go on the dog walk with my husband, but I positively benefit from doing so (duh!)

Mixing it Up, or How Blended is Better

Things are better mixed up. I've always thought this and get irritated when forced to choose. My love of mixing things up is clear in my reading and viewing habits. For example crime = good; supernatural = good, hence urban fantasy supernatural crime fighters = excellent. Oral culture = fascinating; feminism = great, so feminist fairy tales are brilliant.

I think that's one of the reasons my qualifications are fairly broad, too. I studied Modern Languages - you get to do bits of history, literature and social science-y stuff as well as grammar and translation, you know - and then did a fabulous MA in Gender, Literature and Modernity which let me do modules from Women's Studies, English and Social History. They even let me bring MFL into it, so when we did Women's Writing from Africa and the Caribbean, I used some Francophone novels, and when we did the concept of the individual in eighteenth-century Europe, I was able to use some German. Brilliant. Things are definitely better blended.

And now, I have this very satisfying kind of blend in my career too. I'm teaching (secondary English, by the way) part-time in a school at the moment and writing and tutoring the rest of the time. I'm feeling really positive at the moment about what I can do and the possibilities I have. I'm balancing different writing projects, while also generating ideas and pitches for further work on a freelance basis and it's great. Interesting that this seems to be more of a 'thing' now. I just saw people discussing this 'portfolio career' model on my Twitter timeline yesterday (thanks @LynnCSchreiber, who directed me to to this interesting blogpost).

What do you think? Do you like mixing it up too? Are you a portfolio worker?