Never half-ass two things; whole ass one thing.
-Ron Swanson
Lately, I’ve been spreading myself too thin. I’m not alone—nowadays we wear our exhaustion as badges of honour: “I stayed up all night cramming for that exam!” “Oh yeah? Well I’ve been up for 83 hours straight on nothing but Pizza Pops and Red Bull!”
The problem with this mentality, though, is that sometimes it can catch up with us. We are not, in fact, robots. We burn out. We lash out. Things get messy, especially when we put too much on our plates.
So am I advocating giving up your social life and getting 10 hours of sleep? Of course not. Like it or not, being overloaded is often necessary for survival.
What I am advocating, however, is prioritizing. You simply can’t place the same amount of passion and effort into every aspect of your life and expect to be good at everything. So, I pledge to spend less time on Instagram (inspired by the ongoing social media detox our contributor Sophie Isbister has taken on for The Other Press this month) and worrying about what people think of me, and more time writing poems and editing this paper.
What will you give up in the name of sleep and sanity?
