Doing It All

Wilfred coat (similar)
Wilfred sweater (similar)
Mavi jeans
Flattered boots (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Stella & Dot necklace
Linjer rings (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Winnipeg Art Gallery – Winnipeg, Manitoba

“I don’t know how you manage to keep doing it all,” a friend said to me last week, in reference to the fact that I still show up in this space twice a week while working an (often unbearably high pressure) corporate job and still doing basic things like grocery shopping.

“I don’t,” I answered, honestly. “It’s mostly an illusion.” The idea of doing it all is an illusion. There are always sacrifices required and choices to make. If I appear to be doing it all, that’s an illusion, too. Like everyone else, I do the best I can with the number of hours I have in the day. My to-do list is still never ending. It’s been years since I made peace with the fact that I cannot possibly get to the last time on it. Some days, I do better than others. Some days, for example, I can see the bottom of one of my inboxes. Other days, I find myself cleaning three months worth of emails out of another inbox.

I’m not doing it all, I’m doing what I can. And more importantly, I’m prioritising things I want to do because it isn’t possible to do all the things, no matter how tempting it is to try. (And I have tried. But this isn’t an endeavour where if at first you don’t succeed, you might succeed by trying again. We have to accept that some things are just not doable.) It’s the fact that I want to be here that keeps me coming back, even if it doesn’t always feel like I have time – or if I’m so overwhelmed with competing demands that I sit in front of my personal laptop, entering the password for my work laptop, and spend ten minutes baffled about why it won’t unlock. (Yep. It happens.)

This space is my anchor to myself. It reminds me, in a world that makes it entirely too easy to forget, that I’m a person, not a job title. And that if that job title goes away tomorrow, which it could, because nothing is guaranteed, I will still have an identity left.

…that sounds dramatic, but it’s true. It’s a lesson I learned as a teenager when, after spending my whole life practising gymnastics, “being” a gymnast, I left the sport. It took me longer to do than it should have, because I didn’t know who I would be without it. (In fact, I recently stumbled upon a list of the pros and cons of quitting that I wrote when I was fifteen, and it broke my heart – because the last con actually was that I didn’t know who I’d be without gymnastics.) It took me years of stumbling to develop a new sense of who I was and what I wanted in life.

That experience was acutely painful because I could see that those were things I should already know. Everyone around me did. But I’d let myself get so caught up in being just one thing that I’d never given any thought to anything else. So now, I’m not doing it all so much as I am keeping my options open, pursuing different things that I’m passionate about because that’s what makes me a whole person. No one is just one thing. But no one can be everything, either.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I know there is someone who does: you cannot do it all. If that’s what you expect, you’re holding yourself to an impossible standard. But you can do things that matter to you, and you should. It will be hard sometimes. Maybe even a lot of the thing. If it’s important to you, though, it’s still worth it – you’re worth it.

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