The crush

Every morning M.H. asks me what my schedule is for the day, and every day I reply, “I need to work until I die.”

The crushing workload has not let up for one second in all of 2018, and the backlog is getting worse instead of better. A bit of this is my fault for not strategically saying no to things (though I have said no to some things), but the rest of it is sort of the price of being a freelancer. If six of your valued clients need you to work that week—well, you work for six clients that week, unless you want some of them to fire you. Which you do not.

Two things are holding me together, at least most of the time:

1. I do not step into my office or look at my email until 9 a.m. We usually get up at 6 and sort of run around busily until 7, but then I have two hours to have leisurely coffee, leisurely breakfast, leisurely yoga, a leisurely walk, and a short, unsatisfying shower (LOL).
2. I am still taking Saturdays off, though most of the time I am too fried to think of anything particularly fun to do and spend the evening wishing I’d gotten just some freaking work done. This might be part of the process of learning to take a day of rest from my labors, I don’t know.

I almost feel like all that leisure time is the source of my problem, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I mean, I’ve been working from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. or later six days a week…