Greetings and salutations. This is Graham.

Wow, look at Clevenger’s last blog. Talk about giving me PTSD. He literally wrote the standard five paragraph academic paper. Introductory paragraph with topic sentence, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. It’s like he did it just to tease me about my last few months.

See, I started a new journey a few months ago. August, to be precise. Everyone raise your hand if you know what August signifies? That’s right, school starts back. I did the amazingly foolish task of quitting my dead-end, paycheck-to-paycheck, barely-more-than-minimum-wage job and went back to school after a hiatus of nearly a quarter century. It had been so long, in fact, that they no longer had my testing results and I had to retake English 101, writing, you guessed it, standard five paragraph academic papers. So thanks for that, Clevenger.

I’m going to skip around a bit and deliberately not do a structured, organized style. I got sick of those in 101, and now in January I get to do it all over again in English 102. So here we are, trying to talk about balancing writing with carrying on a full time life. Screw that. I can barely balance a cup of coffee while walking to my desk. Back in 2017 I tried going back to school while working full time. That lasted one semester, I dropped one of my three classes, and it was a contributing factor in my crash.

We have talked before about how we did this tremendous push and cranked out the rough draft to Book Two in just a few months. But at the same time I was trying to re-learn how to be a student, and how to have projects with deadlines. See, I’ve been working security, so my responsibilities have been all about showing up and monitoring, not tracking deadlines, planning studying sessions, and working on assignments.

I did not handle my work-life balance very well the last few months. One of the side effects of my mental health issues is that I hyperfocus on activities. I don’t typically bounce between hobbies. No, I play Minecraft almost exclusively for months. Then I move over and get a bug to paint and play 40K, to the exclusion of all other hobbies for weeks or months at a time. In some ways I am reminded of my sister when she was little. She would pick one movie, and watch it back to back to back for weeks. Then she would pick a new movie to completely wear out, to the frustrated last nerve of every other person in the house. So that’s kind of what I did this last bit. I made absolutely sure that school was a priority so that I could make up for failing out of school 25 years ago, and I wrote.

Of course, this means that I did not spend nearly enough time anything else. If it wasn’t school or Clevenger, it got pushed aside. I upset a good friend with this, because I dropped all my gaming hobbies and gave him none of my time. Yes, I have kissed and made up since then, but we are still working through the damage I caused. I also kind of burned myself out. I haven’t written in more than a month. Granted, we finished eight weeks early and technically are still within our scheduled deadline for Book Two. But still, I feel guilty because I am not writing. How many days in September and October did I sit at my computer, absolutely in the mood to write, but I knew I had schoolwork that needed doing? I felt guilty writing, but I couldn’t get my brain to concentrate on homework. So I did nothing. How messed up is that?

See? I told you that my writing was going to be all over the place with this post. It’s fine. I’m looking to do a better job of budgeting my time for this new Spring Semester. Is it going to be as nice and clean as Clevenger makes it out to be? Of course not. And I also know that it is never as clean for him either. He has weeks when one corner of his balance triangle (work, family, hobbies) throws him for a loop. Fortunately we are each working with one of our best friends, so I can listen to him vent and straighten out his thought processes, just like when I have a bad week, he graciously listens to me rant and moan about all my troubles, both real and imagined.

So that’s our big difference. Clevenger has a very busy, active life that he structures and balances as needed. I, on the flip side, just work hard to keep the chaos from mixing the mustard with the superglue. Do I succeed? Well, we do have two and a quarter books written. But now I have to go back and do damage control on all the other areas of my life. We shall see which side wins out. Until then…

Don’t forget to love one another,

Graham