I recently stopped blogging for Babble.com. I'm happy with my decision to resign, but it has left some gaping holes in my life. For one, I no longer have a daily task that fills me with a sense of accomplishment. The things I do all day long are things that everyone does, even people with full-time jobs and no children, so I'm not getting a real boost from emptying the dishwasher or sorting the mail. I'd be doing all that anyway, even if it were just me and the seven or eight cats I'd probably have if it weren't for Dug and the kids.
And for two, and building on the first a bit: I no longer have any accountability. Instead of blocking my time out so that I can get housework, blog work, and downtime with the kids all taken care of, my days can pretty much be summed up as "free-floating". It's not really okay, I don't think, to come to the revelation that if I started to watch Oprah, at least I'd have a scheduled activity every day.
I've considered myself a work in progress for pretty much my whole life, but the dirty little not-so-secret is that I haven't exactly put a lot of work into me. And with the girls getting older and in school, my life is only going to hold more obligations.
I've got some ideas about what I need to do with myself in terms of my role as a housekeeper, my roles as parent and as partner, with my physical health, my future. There's vast room for improvement.
I used to be a part of an online community where the members would occasionally do something that I just loved, and really thrived on: someone would post their list of things they needed to get done that day, and then others would follow suit, and there was something about not just writing it down but telling people about it that was really effective for me. Posting my list made me feel accountable to the people who read it, even though it was only in a psychological sense. When I posted my list, my shit got done.
So maybe workshopping the changes I want to see in my life where others can see them will help me hold myself accountable. I seriously have some shit to do.