"Fruit Snacks"

If it's 4pm, I'm probably craving a nap, and hating myself for it.

My tiredness has been persistent for years now, and my doctor recommended I start taking a general multivitamin and a B-100 vitamin.

(B-Vitamins help increase your energy by making it easier for your body to convert food into calories. After a month of consistent use along with a multivitamin, they've also shown to reduce feelings of stress and improve one's mood.)

I want my body to function well. Ideally, I'd exercise every day and eat well-balanced meals. But it's so hard. Don't get me wrong, I'm up on my feet and moving around all day. But my body needs more energy to do everything I want. I don't want to spend all my energy working, then trying to recover energy so that I can go back to work.

But I don't like taking medicine. I'm a gotta-ride-it-out, lets-build-up-my-immune-system sickie. My worst nightmare: having a little weekly pill box filled with this and that to keep my body running properly.

If I have a vitamin deficiency, I want to see if I can get those nutrients from food before relying on supplements. But I don't really know how to feed myself. Or cook regularly.

This is usually the point when I'd start obsessively reading health blogs and cataloguing recipes and then not actually cooking anything I find.

Nope, not gonna do it.

Baby steps.

I'm all about making good choices as easy as possible. So every Sunday, I'm getting a bunch of fruit and chopping it up. I Keep it in tupperware in the fridge, so if I'm ever in the mood for a snack, I know exactly where to go (i.e. not to Taco Bell)

Sometimes I just want a half an apple. Sometimes I want three. Cutting it into bite size pieces makes eating fruit way, way easy.

Here's a little tip: To keep fruit from getting mushy as quickly, squeeze a half a lime into the tupperware before you toss it in the fridge. It'll preserve the fruit!

For now, I'm taking the vitamins every day. But hopefully I can wean myself off of vitamins and just, you know, fuel my body properly.

One step at a time.

Perfectionism

I am a perfectionist. Maybe you are, too. Maybe you, too, find it hard to "relax" about work. Maybe you, too, take longer than your peers to complete the same tasks because you want to kick it up just one more notch before setting it down. 

School is an easier arena for perfectionists. You can sustain yourself with short bursts of energy and work yourself to the bone, because in a few months, you'll start over. Semester-long sprints, then vacations. Sprint, and rest. Sprint, and rest. 

I never learned how to run marathons.

Perfectionism is great if you also have self control. Which, I've learned, I don't. Instead, I have competitiveness. And that's a toxic combination.

I bite off more than I can chew. Always. This inevitably leads to one of two things:

• Things (or people) get neglected, and I feel awful.
• I mentally implode and hide from the world for a few weeks and wallow in sadness.

(Sometimes both.)

I don't know how to exist as a perfectionist in the real world. I get evaluated by my administrators, sure, but I don't get grades. There isn't really a "winner" anymore. 

Post-school life feels like I'm learning how to walk all over again. 

I was recently reading Laryn Evarts' business model, where she explains that she wanted to pick one thing and be really good at it before even thinking of expanding her company. Makes sense for a business.

Makes sense for life.

I'm not opposed to jumping into things before I'm ready, because that's how I learn best. Besides, no amount of preparation ever makes me feel ready, so I'll be waiting around forever if I wait until I feel ready to take on something new. But the crucial thing here, is to do it one at a time.

One. At. A. Time. 

Pick one thing to jump into. Become really good at it. 

Only then should I consider "expanding" into something new.

So... don't decide to start a new, difficult, high-stakes career AND learn how to do all your own chores for the first time AND move in with your boyfriend AND go to graduate school AND try to make positive lifestyle choices like eating better, exercising, less "screen" time, etc.

Because I really only have the stamina to be good at one thing. I chose the first.

I want to learn how to pace myself because I care about how well I run this race. I don't want to end up vomiting all over the sidewalk after 15 minutes.

And it's not about doing one thing at a time (who's that one-dimensional?) It's about choosing one thing to work on, and making everything else as easy, low-stress as possible.

The Gap

Teaching is an extremely creative, extremely frustrating field. Every day, I have an opportunity to create and implement new things with the added benefit of a guaranteed audience. Yes, there's grading, paperwork, and meetings, but the majority of my day is spent trying to help students understand something they might not know yet, in the best way I know how.

But the most frustrating part of my job isn't the paperwork. It's not the grading. It's not the meetings.

It's the opportunity to create.

There just isn't enough time to think of, plan, and implement a creative math lesson every day. Because there's the paperwork. There's the grading. There's the physical exhaustion of being on your feet all day. There's the occasional mental block. There's the laundry.

It'd be one thing if I couldn't tell that what I said was too wordy, or that their activity wasn't focused enough, or that it was too vague, boring, slow, fast, what have you.

But I can tell. And that makes me feel like I'm not working hard enough ("this clearly wasn't my best") which, then, makes it hard to work at all ("what's the point?")

I recently heard an interview by Ira Glass that helps put things in perspective:



I've spent the past nine months in the following cycle: work, nap, eat, worry, sleep, and repeat. I spent such a disproportionate time thinking about work, that I began neglecting everything else.

And that's not how I want to live.

It's time to grow up.