Hobbies.

Throughout school and university hobbies were what took over most of my life. When 3:30pm came and the school bell rang I would grab my bags and head to hockey, rugby, net-ball, running club or piano lessons. This has been the routine for most of my life thus far. However, now working full time and travelling three hours a day means that I don’t really have that much spare time to do anything other than exercise, eat dinner and sleep. This routine has been making me a little bit (read: hugely) frustrated over the last few months.

I’m the sort of person who likes to achieve things. Be that getting good grades in my work, finish a half marathon, read a certain amount of books in a specific time frame etc. Due to regularly working weekends and not arriving home until late on weekdays I have been feeling as though I have not been achieving much at all recently which has not been good.

I often feel my blood start to boil and my body begins to shake with frustration and anger almost that I’m not out there constantly achieving and working so hard that I am truly exhausted. It’s like we want to be stressed and tired just so we can tell people that we’re stressed and tired so that they will think, “oh waw, she works hard.” 

But that’s just stupid.

I do have my hobbies – exercising, reading, playing the piano, listening to music, writing and so on. And I do really want to do more of every single one of them but that’s not too realistic right now. Instead of getting frustrated that maybe I don’t have time right now to dedicate to them all simultaneously I am going to just pick one or two a week that I will concentrate on; making everything seem less daunting.

I don’t know about you but I often find myself wasting time thinking of all the things that I need/want to be doing instead of actually doing them. Once you actively start to get the ball rolling things don’t seem so impossible. By prioritising one or two hobbies a week instead of constantly thinking of all the things I want to be doing but not having time for, I hope this will allow me to feel more accomplished and less like a failure.

I’ve only been in full time work for 6 months so I’m still learning on how to time manage everything but breaking issues up into smaller more manageable pieces just makes life seem more achievable.