As I’ve already written about, in many respects, April was an aberration of a month — a period that I can look back at already with no shortage of, huh, that was weird. Not bad, by any degree (in many ways, it was a better month than most, if not all, so far this year), but certainly an odd one that threw all of my rhythms out of whack in ways that were probably good for me.
Much of this was work related; there was a full two-and-a-half weeks where I wasn’t working my traditional Monday-Friday schedule for multiple external reasons, which made for an interesting, exhausting experience. The long and the short of it is was that I probably worked more hours than I would have otherwise, but at entirely different times; I worked two weekends in a row, for example, and there were three days where I was working what we called “Japanese hours,” because it was to cover a show in Tokyo, but in practice it meant 13 hour shifts that ended around 1am, which is a problem when my body clock refuses to let me sleep past 6am any given morning.
(There were also a couple mornings where my head decided to get so stressed about things that ultimately don’t matter that I woke up around 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep; those were fun too, he lied.)
What’s more interesting to me looking back, though, was what I did in response to all of this external stress: I read more, and watched more movies, in what little downtime I did have. I went for more walks, as the weather improved, and realized that exercise and seeing other human beings instead of staring at walls was actually good for me. I went to the movies; I found new restaurants to eat at. It felt as if, for the first time this entire calendar year, I was proactively finding space for doing things that felt good, and were good for me, instead of just trying to keep my head above water the entire time.
It’s a nice feeling. I should do more of that, I think.