Time

I started the blog back up as a way to have carve out some "me" time. Evidently, I still struggle with the balancing act. Some blogs seem to be purely about the pretty, others are all woe is me. I think I'm somewhere in between. I have to remember that blogs generally represent merely a snippet of a whole, living, breathing human being. I do want my blog to be a place where I can express all of who I am. After all, I like to think I'm a multi-faceted person with complex identities. Even as a 35 year old woman, I am still "figuring out who I am". But the way I (and others who understand identity as situated, fluid and not fixed/static) think about identity takes into account not just how I position myself in the world, but how others position me, and I how perceive I am positioned by others. That's a very long winded way of saying, some days I want to just schlep around and show up to work looking a hot mess, but I can't, because, dammit, I care too much about appearances.

Turning 35 last month was painful. It still is.  Literally. I've been very public about the anxiety that has come with getting older. Although many people tell me I look younger, mainly because (I think) of my petite stature, my body is feeling it. Climbing up my the stairs holding my almost 3 year old, my knees feel it. I see it in my skin - the pores are larger than ever, the under eye concealer settles in the fine lines.

Professionally I am not in a place where I want to be. Although I mostly love the work I do in an after school setting, each day I feel that given my background (# of years spent in school, amount of $ spent in school, amount $ owed for school, etc.), every day I spend in this job is starting to feel a little too luxurious. That is to say, while I feel no guilt whatsoever at the end of the day in terms of the impact of my work on a small yet important group of young people, I feel a considerable amount of guilt for the small impact I am making monetarily in terms of the income I bring home at the end of the month. Things will have to change.

For one, I am picking up the dreaded D again. I am in the process of writing a rationale to my boss for why I should get paid to write my dissertation. I want to take one day each week away from my job to just write the damn thing. No small task. But I've decided my third job, (after taking care of family and my 9-5 job) is to finish the damn thing. I think it can be done. I think the more I see it in writing, and hear myself talk about it with people, the more I will hold myself accountable. To have limitless time.