Tripping on the high wire

By Olive L. Sullivan

I had a fabulous weekend, the kind that finds you at work on Monday morning still smiling. But I’m exhausted.

It started Friday with dinner at my parents’ house. On Saturday, my fiber artist friend Colleen and I did an arts workshop, and then dashed home to change and drove to Kansas City for a concert by my favorite blues artist Kelley Hunt. We arrived back in Pittsburg at 3:30 in the morning, and I was up Sunday in time to go to my poetry critique group. From there, I dashed off to pick up my sweetie and we headed to Joplin for lunch and a concert at St. Philip’s. We then allowed ourselves to be swept off to dinner at JB Elephant’s with the musicians and some friends. By seven o’clock, I was ready to either burst into tears or become exceedingly silly. By eight thirty, I was home in bed.

At first glance, it looks very well balanced. I covered all the important bases in my life: time with family, time to honor my creativity in various ways, time spent with my boyfriend, and restorative time listening to a variety of good music with friends. I even did a little networking here and there.

These are the things that got left out: sleep, laundry, dog walks in the woods, and reading. Not to mention the freelance projects I’m still working on.

In my quest for balance, I’ve hit a wobbly patch. With less structured writing jobs, I’ve been able to combine fun and work in a way that no longer seems to be working. As a newspaper reporter, for example, I was “on” all the time. I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went, and I could be at a concert, a play, out to dinner with friends, or even shopping when a story idea would hit, I would buttonhole someone for an impromptu interview, and an article would appear in print the next day. I was either at work, thinking about work, preparing for work, catching up on work, or recovering from work. And my family and friends joked that a lot of what I called “work” looked like what they called leisure. For example, my family and I toured an apple orchard in Missouri. They had a great time, bought apples and cider, and called it a fun outing. I had a great time, wrote about it, and called it work. I’ve been on trips, including two weeks in Costa Rica, that looked like vacation to some, and were work to me. The up side is pretty obvious – I was always enjoying myself. The down side was that I never really focused on the creative writing that is important to me, because I was always scrambling for an idea that would pay.

Some people work all the time because their job is their life, but my struggle will be familiar to anyone who goes to work primarily to pay the bills, shunting their real passion into weekends and all-too-rare vacations. And don’t even get me started on vacations. When I started here at the real job, I joked that the main drawback is that it cuts into my travel schedule. As I hit the reality of limited vacation time and endless possibilities, that’s no longer quite as funny. Since I’ve never had to compartmentalize my life before, I’m finding it a real challenge. I have cut 50 hours out of my week and put it in a box labeled “real job.” But I still have 70-plus hours of life to cram into what’s left over. It ain’t working.

When I started my current job -- which, you’ll recall, I really enjoy -- I thought I would also have more time and energy to devote to my creative writing. I am working on a poetry collection and finishing up a novel, two projects which have consistently been shoved to the back shelf while I have been trying to make a living. I’m also working on a screenplay, which needs to be top priority right now. But if it’s at the top of the to-do list, how can I get it done when my time is otherwise allocated to the real job that pays the bills and feeds an important part of my identity? And what about family, friends, sweetheart, dogs? Books? Cooking? Sleep?

My mother, who has never held down a full time job – although no one would make the mistake of saying she has never worked! – pushes the notion that my current job allows me the freedom to put it down at the end of the day. I work 8 to 5, and I’m done. I come home and have the leisure to do whatever I want. This is true, in its own way. What it doesn’t take into account is that I don’t have the energy to do whatever I want, after working 8 to 5 and commuting nearly two hours. My dogs are especially distraught. The first couple of weeks, Romeo, my big German Shepherd mix, would be so excited to see me that he had a hard time remembering humans don’t show love by biting each other’s noses. He has calmed down, but it’s the calm resignation of someone who knows he’ll never get another evening walk – at least not until the days get longer and I can get home before dark.

When I was in college, I worked for campus publications. I regularly worked until 2 or 3 a.m., and was in class the next morning getting As. I rode my bike everywhere, went to concerts, took lots of trips, and generally had a great time. Who needed sleep? Unfortunately, it turns out, here in my middle years, that I do. I need sleep to restore my physical energy, but also for the mental and creative energy that I rely on. I mentioned that screenplay. I’m in the envious position of having a producer waiting for it (impatiently). In my previous freelancing life, I’d be done with it by now, because it would have been the focus of my efforts. No matter what else I was doing, I would be thinking of the script, and bits and pieces of my day would find their way into the pages. That’s still happening, of course – that’s part of the writing process – but it’s happening at a far slower rate. My focus is scattered like sunlight on the ocean, and I’m looking for the rainbow.

Reading my last column, my editor posed the question, “Will your newfound 8-to-5 be the center of your universe or just the part that you squeeze in before the important stuff?”

The problem is figuring out what the important stuff really is. You’ve heard the rule, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and its corollary, “Remember, it’s all small stuff.” Well, in my life, it’s all important stuff. I’m not willing to cut Friday dinners with my folks, time with my sweetie, music, time with friends, including dogs. I can’t really cut out the creative stuff because it’s such an integral part of who I am. And of course I can’t shirk my job, for so many reasons, not the least of which is the overriding ethic that makes me expect excellent performance from myself – a thing worth doing is worth doing well.

On the other hand, I have long said that if I’m not having fun doing something, I’m not going to do it. To me, the beauty of that statement is that it can be taken a couple of different ways. The first, obvious reading is that I won’t do it if it’s not fun. The other side of that is that if I have to do it, I’ll make it fun. Everything I did this weekend was fun by its very nature. I guess my struggle will be to make the things that got left out seem like as much fun as the things that I did squeeze in.

I know that not every weekend will be as jam-packed as this one was, but I expect that the holiday season will include many more like it. My goal is to enter January feeling restored and blessed, not frazzled and exhausted, having given my best energy to those I love and care about – including dogs, and including myself – and honoring who I truly am.

Whoever that is.

If you have thoughts on this topic, I would love to hear them – especially if you have figured out the answers! E-mail me at olive@olivesullivan.com, and I’ll try to address some of your ideas in a future column.

My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on October 28, 2008. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.