You’ll let people down, okay?
It’s part of it. You can’t avoid it. It is actually, physically impossible for you to be everywhere and do everything and be everything to everyone with a plate of fucking cookies in your hand. (BUT NICE TRY, THOUGH.)
Doing one thing that matters to you *requires you* to stop doing many things that matter to someone else. Just like you’ve only got so much space in your stomach at every meal, you’ve only got so much bandwidth in your brain. So who are you going to pick? Them, or you?
That sounds cynical and hostile and war-like and antithetical to all of the woo woo warm cozy lovey dovey advice on the Internet (gag), but I prefer to call it real. Logistics has never been my strong suit (HI I’M A CREATIVE), but that just means that I’ve had to work harder than most to get good at it. And one thing that’s abundantly apparent to me, as an outsider to all that is coordination utopia, is that we’re all trying to stuff so goddamn much onto our plates and our schedules and our lives—and it isn’t working.
And you know what happens? Not only are you going to feel like a gigantic, disorganized, flaky hot mess, but everything you try to do is going to suffer. By trying to be everything to everyone we inadvertently end up showing up like a used bag of dicks and then what good are we? It’s like trying to write a book that’s a masterpiece, but instead of sitting down and writing it, we actually start writing one little paragraph of everybody else’s books, first—here’s one for you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you. CAN YOU IMAGINE? How soon do you think your own work in this world is going to get realized? And how much are you willing to bet it’s going to be, um, less than brilliant?
Stop doing things on autopilot. Stop obligating yourself more than anyone deserves. Stop being at the beck and call of every ding, tweet, message and whim. And in fact, make a stop doing list…and then stop.
Don’t those words feel good?
…and then stop.
This is what self care looks like.
But it’s also what hustle looks like, if you’re looking closely.