A Later Start

I did not want to get up this morning, so I laid in bed for an extra hour and thought about sleeping all day. It was a nice thought, but the reality is that sleeping in all day is not realistic when you have a week of bereavement leave coming up at the beginning of the contract year. I am going to blow through my entire stash of days off to go to the East Coast for a memorial service for my cousin. We are also going to spend some time with other family members, so it will be a combination of mourning and visiting. So, the time off will be well spent, but it is happening, so I can't really take days off to just sleep. 

I was talking to an Introduction to Music Therapy student last night about the life of a music therapist. One of the questions this student asked was how I avoided burnout. I liked that question because it is something I think about...lots of the time! My answer included many of the things that I talk about on this blog - things like knowing yourself, finding a support system to assist, the ProQoL assessment, lots of self-care strategies, and cultivating things to do that are in no way related to music therapy in your life.

I view this morning as a part of my self-care routine. There are times when I just don't feel like springing out of bed at my usual 4am, so I have some wiggle room built into my routine. My mornings tend to be pretty fixed. I wake up, take my temperature and my medications, drink some water, do some social media stuff, play some games, and blog. When I'm finished with these things, I head off to work. I am almost always significantly early to work because I tend to have more energy in the mornings than in the afternoons. I have difficulty staying at home doing home things in the mornings. To be completely honest, I also have difficulty doing home things in the evenings, so I guess most of my problem is not wanting to do home things. That's an entirely different blog topic...

Staying in bed for an extra hour is a silly little thing, but it is an effective one for me. I am not responsible for getting other humans into their morning routines, so I can control my own routine the way it works best for me. That's a luxury, to be sure. It is one that I use when I can to help me reset my self. This later start is not uncommon for me during the month of September - the nights are starting to get cooler and I start to enjoy being cozy and not wanting to get up and get going. I will probably try to stay at home a bit more in the early mornings because I do spend lots of extra time at work that I do not get paid for because I am an early riser. This is the time of year when I am most likely to set goals to NOT get to work early. I always fail at those goals, so no goal setting this year! I am going to try my best to give myself the opportunity to take these mornings as they come up.

It is the time of day when I start to get itchy. Does that ever happen to you? Do you ever start to get nervous about being late? I do. It is 5:50am and I am starting to think that I will be late to work unless I give myself extra time, just in case. The actuality is that no one at work cares when I arrive, as long as I arrive. I did have to tell my boss that I will most likely be working the 7:15-3:15 shift most days, but I don't think that there is anyone who is sitting there watching the clock. We do not clock in, due to being salaried, so it is really a moot point about when we arrive. If I don't arrive until 7:20, the only person who is stressed by that fact is me. 

I am trying to be less hard on myself, but the time thing is my permanent anxiety point.

So, getting a later start and then forcing myself not to panic when the clock turns to 6am and the sun starts to rise as I am not driving into the east, is a way of working through my anxiety. I will be anxious, but it might be nice to take some later mornings. My brain starts to envision things happening that will make me late - school buses, combines, accidents. What will happen when I am late? Absolutely NOTHING! So, what is the problem?

This has turned into a discussion about my anxiety and addressing that rather than the piece of self-care that I thought it was going to be at the start of this time.

My extra hour of laziness was good for me today. It has helped me to realize that I do not have to rush towards anything. It is now 6:08am, and the itch is there! 22 minutes until I am going to leave. 22 minutes...ugh.