Day four of NaBloPoMo, which means that it’s my goal to write one blog post every day this month. To be perfectly honest, I’m not really feeling the whole writing thing today. However, I’m going to show up and write anyway because it feels good. It’s kinda like yoga. I love the way it makes me feel but I grumble about finding the motivation to do it.
October was such a hard month for me. I had so many things going on. So many! I had to deal with fixing a $5,000 issue with my house. I was trying desperately to meet the deadline for the 2020 Planner and the Self-Love Workbook. I’d work myself to the point of exhaustion and then a little more for good measure.
I was working 9 hours at my “regular” job and then coming home and working another 8 hours to get everything done and edited for the workbooks. Moderating my groups. Creating images for social media. Keeping up with my emails. Doing household chores.
Working in this industry is hard.
I’ve seen so many bloggers and business gurus talk about the secret to making a six-figure income while barely working. There’s even one blogger that I used to be a huge fan of. She’s now all about how “You too can learn to make thousands of $$$ by only working x amount of hours a week”. It makes me so sad because I remember when she talked about how she nearly had a serious mental breakdown in her early days of creating content for her website.
How she was so exhausted and stressed and depleted that she was crying before taping the videos for the e-course she was working on.
But those stories get lost.
Because easy sells. Dangling the dream of a successful online business in front of someone and telling them that it’s stress-free and requires minimum effort and they’ll tell you how – gets them a customer.
The lack of authenticity makes me sad. While I’m sure they’ve all gotten to the point where their business (with assistants) runs itself, it’s important to be transparent about the history that gets you there.
Eight years ago, this blogger was so authentic and even though I knew it would be hard to blog and create, she inspired me. I think it was seeing the passion behind it that made a difference to me. To give all of yourself to something and keep giving even when you were tired.
I’d never had anything like that in my life before.
I didn’t get into blogging because I thought it would be an easy way to make money. I started blogging because I knew it would be worth it.
It is worth it on every level. Even on the days when I’m overwhelmed and having a melt-down, it’s so worth it. Real and worth it.
I’m not saying that working yourself to exhaustion is honorable or good. As someone who is all about self-care, it made me feel more than a tad bit hypocritical that I was so blatantly neglecting my needs last month. I would literally tell myself that I needed to step away and take a break or go to bed on time, or spend time with my wife, and then I’d ignore myself because of w-o-r-k.
Which is why I’m taking a self-care break.
I’m stepping back from working on any new products until the new year and instead I’m focusing on the other things that I love. Writing, designing cute images for social media, spending time with my love, reading, and video games. No deadlines for a few months, just time to collect myself so that I can jump back in, feet first, in a few months.
I will never stop preaching about how important self-care is, especially for those of us *ahem* that have trouble taking a step back sometimes.
My self-care goals for this week:
Listen to three audiobooks
Read one regular book
Spend one hour playing a video game each day
Leaving my other job on time instead of being guilted into overtime
Visiting a world food store with my love and finding strange and interesting snacks
Sleeping in on my days off and not feeling guilty (I, no joke, cried a few weeks ago because I slept for nine hours on my day off and I was mad at myself for not waking up earlier)
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