It was one of those weeks when I didn’t so much consciously leave the office as find myself collapsing into my apartment at 9pm, 10pm. On Friday night I managed to leave before 8, but by then I was surviving entirely on a combination of respect for the efforts of my team, sheer bad mind, and chocolate cookies.

I don’t write this to fetishize busy-ness; I write this to acknowledge that I am the kind of person who is both naturally prone to working all the time and the kind of person who regularly accepts jobs designed to ensure I have the opportunity to work all the time.

I write this because I cannot be that kind of person all the time. I have friendships I would like to do better at maintaining. I have relationships that I need to show up for. I have a yoga practice I would like to revive. I have a delightful personal trainer I have functionally abandoned. I have a physiotherapist I need to see before my wrists and my neck return to a state of semi-permanent distress. I write this because I need to hold myself accountable to myself, for myself.

And I write this because I am trying to figure out how to spend more time moving us forward and less time ensuring other people don’t push us all backward.

On we go.

Attribution:

“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.” - From “We Lived Happily During The War” by Ilya Kaminsky

—

The Main Event is primarily a subscription-based newsletter. If you appreciated this missive, please consider supporting my writing habit with a monthly or annual subscription. If you’re already a supporter, thank you on behalf of all the books I just bought.

Subscribe - 25% off first month