When your social calendar is a tale of woe
Lessons on dealing with overwhelm and trying to be everything to everyone
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I’ve previously written articles about how I liberated myself from the wheel of endless social engagements, my tips for keeping it calm and manageable, and reducing that sense of overwhelm. A lofty pedestal to place myself on, only for the entire thing to collapse spectacularly over the last few months, to the point that all the usual symptoms have returned: wanting to cry every time I open my calendar, feeling relief when someone cancels, and hearing myself utter the words ‘I have a free spot in three weeks’ and wanting to throw a flip-flop at my head.
Currently, I am writing this to you from social calendar rehab while at home. Technically, I should be in Iceland, preparing to hike up a glacier, but an imminent volcanic eruption has grounded my plans to fly out there. Given how over-stretched I’ve been, especially in the last month, I should have been relieved to have four free days. But the minute I found out my trip had been cancelled, my brain started to go into overdrive thinking about what I could do instead, and who I should text to meet up.
In that moment, I realised the problem wasn’t that I had too many things to do, or people making demands on my time – the problem was me. Chiefly, my inability to prioritise rest, and the misguided belief that I need to say yes to everything or everyone’s lives will collapse. The disappointment I feel about going backwards is immense, especially given how hard I worked to extricate myself in the first place.
The bad old days
Around a decade ago, my social calendar was something that made me feel short of breath when I looked at it. I was married at the time, and it wasn’t just my social calendar, it was ‘our’ social calendar. Although we didn’t have children, work was extremely busy, and between all of the elements in my life, it felt as if there was rarely space to do nothing, or to be spontaneous. A low point was looking at my calendar, realising that my weekends were planned up to three months in advance.
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