Sometime last month I was standing in my kitchen at 11pm, eating rice I had cooked at 7pm and forgotten about, replying to a message I should have replied to three days ago, and mentally drafting something that was due the next morning, all at once, standing up, And the thought that crossed my mind was not this is too much, It was, I just need to manage my time better.
That is how deep it goes for me. I was visibly overwhelmed and my first instinct was to make it a scheduling problem, because if it is a scheduling problem, I can fix it, I can download an app or block out hours or wake up earlier, but if the real issue is that I have been ignoring what my body and mind have been trying to tell me for months ,that I have limits and I have been treating them like suggestions that is a different, scarier conversation.
I do not actually run out of time. I run out of myself, and then I blame the clock.
The situations that make me feel like I'm doing too much are never the big obvious ones, It is not a crazy deadline or a major life event, It is the accumulation of small yeses I said when I meant no, It is the favour I took on because I didn't want to seem difficult. It's the group chat I feel responsible for holding together, It is checking my phone first thing in the morning, before I have even fully arrived in my own day, already measuring how much of myself I owe to other people.
The tiredness that comes from that kind of living doesn't feel like tiredness at first, it feels like being behind, like a low grade urgency that doesn't go away even on weekends, Like sitting down to rest and feeling vaguely guilty about it, like rest has to be earned and I haven't quite earned it yet.
What I'm slowly learning and I mean slowly, painfully slowly, is that feeling like you do not have enough time is almost always your body saying you have given too much of yourself away and there's not enough left for the basics. It's not a productivity issue, It is a boundary issue. It is a self honesty issue.
And the hard part is that nobody is forcing me, That is the part I have to sit with, most of the weight I am carrying, I picked up voluntarily, I just picked it up so gradually that I did not notice how heavy it got.
I don't have a clean ending for this. I'm still in it. I still overcommit. I still eat forgotten rice at 11pm, but I am at least starting to call it what it is not a time problem, not a discipline problem, just me, pretending I don't have limits.
I do though, we all do, and they don't go away just because we keep ignoring them.
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