Teaching Myself to Try – Without Forcing Myself to Have It Be “My Best” Effort

It’s been quite some time since I blogged over here. Truth be told, I miss it, but have felt so busy over the last few years that I couldn’t get into the headspace to write about anything personal.

What I really missed was the idea of blogging more personably, and not just informatively, like about cat facts & pet care over on my cat blog, KittyClysm, or about plant care & plant facts on my gardening blog, Potting Plans.

These types of posts are incredibly rewarding to write, but they feel a lot less creative – a lot more draining, and yet I’d put pressure on myself to only write posts like them, where I felt I was helping people and not merely expressing my thoughts.

I also put pressure on myself to finish the things I started. To give things enough effort if I was going to give them effort at all. This mindset became exhausting.

Now, I’m trying to learn to live with the hectic-ness of life, not trying to fight against it.

Trying to tell myself – it’s okay if I start blog posts and don’t finish them. That working on a post for 10 minutes and it sitting in my drafted posts for the rest of eternity is okay.

That it’s okay to make an effort – that it doesn’t always have to be about trying “my best” – I can just try, and put in as much effort as I want at the time, rather than as much as I physically feel I can put.

Ironically, this mentality is helping me burn out less quickly, and without so much pressure, I feel I actually do better than “my best” would have been because I can sustain effort when I’m not so drained.

I guess it’s a little like those people who are okay putting down books they struggle to get through (I say “those people” because this is not an easy thing for me to do) – they read more. Because they’re not trying to force what isn’t jiving with them at any particular moment.

I need to take a note out of their book (pun unintended, this time!) and stop forcing effort. Start putting in what effort I can initially, and if it’s not working out, scrapping what I’m working on and trying something else.

I started a little Habit Tracker in excel where I added a bunch of things to do on the daily, from household chores to work – and just getting as many as I can done in a day or as much as I can, but not forcing myself to particular categories that I have to concentrate on – is really helping me feel balanced.

If I want to tidy more one day and work on blog posts the next, that’s fine. Especially if I only slack on household chores for a day and then am back the next day.

It helps me see the progress I’ve made, and I try to limit the “pushing myself” by making the tasks on my habit tracker possible to do in 10 minutes. If I continue past that, great. If not, the effort was still worth something, and so a “point” is added.

I’ve also added things I want to do, yet never seem to find the time for – like make art of any kind (photography, writing poetry, drawing, anything really!). Thus far this has yielded a number of poems (that I won’t be sharing!) and photographs of the cats, including the pictures in this post.

Hopefully, this yields less stress from relieved pressure, less burnout, and a whole lot more contentedness around what I’m actually accomplishing.

Seems to be working, as I’ve finally started writing again on this blog. Here’s to hoping it will yield plenty more personal blog posts.