Navigating and coordinating all expectations, roles and seemingly selfish personal wishes can be hard. Especially when you feel there might be a little too much going on in your life already. I often get the feeling that if I were living on an uninhabited island with my husband and son, everything would be so much easier: Nobody would be there to make me do anything, or to give me a bad conscience; there wouldn’t be necessities beyond the stuff that’s simply human, and so on.
Of course, this is a delusion. The voices I hear (“Come visit me regularly despite the distance”, “do a good job and no, I don’t want to hear about your sick child”, “be a good mother” etc.) are mine, and mine alone. They wouldn’t go away just by moving outside of civilisation. I alone have the power to make them stop, to put them in their place. To set priorities in a way that suits me and the ones I love. To live my very own, highly individual life, and to make choices that, each and every one of them, put the people and things first that I love and cherish most (and yes, this does include myself), instead of blindly following advice, doing it “the way it was always done”, or following some other lead.
I have to take my own lead, I’m afraid, and navigate the sea that is my life in a direction that makes me happy. If it only were as easy as it sounds.
The Mindwheels 