What do you focus on?

I've been thinking a lot lately about my life and where I'm going.

I've heard people say time and again that if you really wanted something, you'd find the time for it. I don't agree with that. Yes, there's a certain level prioritizing that has to go on, but I think that facile comment really doesn't take into account the ever-shifting equation of real life. Yes, I really want to be a writer. So I write and reach out and build. Unfortunately, I really need to be able to pay my rent. Hence the Daily Planet job. Finding a balance between the two of those is not an easy thing.  And when the Daily Planet job goes into bio-break only mode, guess which one trumps.

There are certain bedrock things that transcend the word "want".  It's not "I want to sleep." Whether you really want it or really don't, something like that has to happen. The kids, the house, whatever. If the dog needs to go out, she needs to go out and if that means you find yourself tethered to a peeing dog in the pouring rain at 2am, then that's the way it is. By the time you get down through to the bottom of that list, there's often precious little left for the wants.

You can push it. To try to derive some answer for the day that includes at least some of all of the above I've been going short on sleep for years. But that trick is very much a young person's game.  At some point, that equation divides itself by zero and you drop everything trying to recover.

So, we'll see. I'm sick of trying to describe these things with the current math. So I'm going to try to be like Newton and invent the life-balance version of calculus and figure out a way to make this all work. Or maybe it'll all turn out to be the scrawls of a crazy prisoner on the walls of her cell.