Tag: vacation

My Epic Summer Vacation

GFM / 5 years ago

Every summer for the last few years, I have had 8 weeks of vacation. And every summer for the last few years, I have felt compelled to fill every single second of those 8 weeks off with some kind of work, job or project. I’ve felt this intense pressure to have a great story of what I did with my time off to prove that I was somehow worthy of this time off. I break out in cold sweats just thinking about having to face my coworkers and their ‘So, what did you do over the summer?’ questions. It’s almost not worth the anxiety vacation causes.

It’s been pointed out to me that maybe this isn’t the point of vacation and maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe my coworkers don’t care and are just making small talk. They’re probably not judging me at all if I don’t have a justification for my time off. Maybe I should calm the hell down.

But here’s the thing:

I am often very hard on myself.

I don’t listen very well when I’m not being told what I want to hear.

I am very stubborn.

I have anxiety.

It’s not uncommon for one to be hard on one’s self. Often we are our own worst critics and I’m no different. It’s also not unusual to not want to listen to someone when they’re telling you something you don’t want to hear.

Why can’t each and every person in my life just blindly enable me to do what I want, by telling me exactly what I want to hear?

I am stubborn. Very stubborn. Which only exacerbates the fact that I’m both very hard on myself and don’t want to listen to people who don’t want to validate my criticisms of myself.

And lastly, I have anxiety. Anxiety likes to focus on something small and grow it into a big, paralyzing problem. It doesn’t have to be rational. It usually isn’t.

It’s a frustrating combination.

At least I’m willing to admit that?

Anyway. What is my point here? My point is that maybe it’s okay to take a break. Maybe you can just enjoy vacation time and not feel the need to defend the fact that you’re taking things easier.

Maybe I don’t have an epic story of how I remodelled my kitchen, built a nature sanctuary for donkeys, or hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. But that’s okay.

We all work hard. We’re all doing our best. And we’re all surviving through the darkest timeline right now.

Like, have you watched the news for longer than five seconds? Because I haven’t. Anything longer than 2 seconds shoves my anxiety into overdrive.

So I’m going to try to not guilt myself into having to prove that I made good use of my vacation time. I’m not going to be baited into feeling like I need an epic story or example of how I spent summer vacation.

I’m planning on a summer vacation that can be just that: vacation. And that’s okay.

 

 

My 3 Summer Projects of 2017 (Because I don’t know how to vacation)

Projects / 6 years ago

With my new day job, I’ve been spoiled with a ridiculous 10 weeks of vacation. I’ve had summers off, which at first sounded like a really great idea. But by the third week, I’m starting to get a bit restless. So for the last few summers, I’ve tackled a project to keep me busy. Two summers ago, it was updating the main bathroom. Last summer, it was the development and launch of a website for one of my freelance clients.

See? I’m bad at vacationing.

This summer, instead of tackling one big project, I’m working on a few smaller ones:

Setting up the office

I’ve fallen into a bad habit of working from my couch. While it’s nice to have the flexibility to choose to work there from time to time, I’m not a huge fan of the fact it’s becoming my home base. My end tables are covered with office supplies, which frequently end up in my dog’s mouth. There are a lot of distractions when I work from the couch and it means there is next to no work-life separation. I could easily just work all the time.

We do have a home office. It just doesn’t look like one right now. So I plan to set this up so it’s useable as a workspace. This is going to be quite the project. Because there is so much stuff in there that doesn’t need to be.

Which brings me to my second project of the summer:

Decluttering the house

We bought this place 8 years ago and I can’t believe how much stuff has collected in that time. Our guest bedroom, spare bedroom and home office are all full of random stuff that otherwise doesn’t really have a home. Instead of having three storage rooms, I want to restore them to their former glory: a guest bedroom, a workout room/ spare room and a home office.

This means I’ll have to go through boxes and piles of random stuff that we haven’t really used. I have boxes in what should be the home office that are full of kitchen and living room items we packed up three years ago when we tore up and replaced all the floors on our main level and have forgotten about. Clearly, it isn’t anything we need. We haven’t gone looking for that stuff for three years.

There are binders and notes from the various post secondary courses we’ve done that need sorting and consolidation. We have more books than shelves to put them on. There are clothes and shoes and even extra furniture that is just taking up space. So I want to tackle those rooms, decide what’s to be donated, what’s to be recycled and what needs to be trashed. It’ll be awesome to have more useable space and I purging and organizing. It feels so good.

Yes, I know. I’m weird. Stop looking at me like that.

Taming my wild garden

Not a euphemism.  I’ve never really cared too much about our garden, if I’m being perfectly honest. I’ve had gardens other places that I’ve lived. My favourite was the front garden in the house I lived in during my second and third year of college. It was beautiful and full of wild flowers, Black-Eyed Susans, hostas and poppies. Until the new home owners ripped it out the day they took possession of that house. Those fucking monsters.

This could be why I lost interest in putting an effort into my garden. I was fine to let my front garden do its thing, but haven’t really planned it out or planted anything new. It fit it with my surrounding neighbours and their (lack of) landscaping. Everything was cool.

Then last summer, my stupid new neighbours ripped out their garden, built it up with brick edging, planted gorgeous plants and even finished it off with mulch. Their garden makes ours look pathetic. So at the risk of having my heart broken when we sell this place (hopefully in the next few years), and another beloved garden is murdered by some heartless monster, I want to tackle my garden.

Those are my summer projects. Do you plan projects to take on in your down time or vacation time? Or are you better at taking vacation than I am? Can you teach me how to relax?

Tell me all about it in the comments!