As previously mentioned in a couple posts last week, I had a bit of a menty b last week. If you aren’t chronically online, then you may not be familiar with with “menty b”, however it is just a short form for mental breakdown and to me it applies to when you aren’t actually having a mental breakdown, that is an actual diagnosis, but you do feel like you are losing the plot, getting lost in the sauce, etc. There are many ways to describe it. But I wasn’t feeling good, and on reflection a bit route cause of it is that I am never completing anything, at home nor at work.
The work projects I don’t have a ton of control over, I have transitioned from a job with quick turnarounds, tighter timelines, and more concrete projects to longer term, larger scale, more vague projects. So I’ve gone from being able to complete projects in a relatively short time, to not having anything even conceivably finished for months if not years.
But then at home, in theory I should have complete control over my home. But I just feel like it’s a runaway train. There are always dishes undone, or clean dishes not put away, there are papers to go through, mail to sort, fridges to clean out, sheets to wash, litterboxes to clean, dust bunnies to vacuum, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera for the res of our lives. And I just don’t know how to keep up with it.
I also don’t know if I am only noticing these things in our post-pandemic because during lockdowns and work-from-home, I had so much time for home projects. Lockdown seems like a whole lifetime ago, because I lived in a completely different place, but during work-from-home (some of which was spent in lockdowns, of course) I had such a good system. That one hour at lunch used to cover most of my daily chores: dishes, cleaning the litterbox, vacuuming, and sometimes even doing my ironing. However, going into the office every day really does create so much more work, meal prep, more laundry, more ironing, getting ready, more clothes piled up on the clothes chair, more wear on those clothes which means more repairs, more shoe and jewelry maintenance.
These are just the unedited pictures that I can take from my seat on the couch, there is so much more in the other rooms.
And that’s not even getting into the bigger projects that we all have, that’s just the daily stuff.
Whether you rent or own, there are always little projects that you want to do in your home (at least if you’re a renter like me and most of the people I know). Like I refinished a dresser in July and it still doesn’t have drawer pulls on it. I have to slide my fingers under the lip of the drawers to open them, and like, I keep my socks and workout clothes in there and I use it every single day. Not to mention the bigger cleaning projects like cleaning out the fridge or the washing machine or organizing cupboards and drawers. Or décor projects, I would love to repaint my room (really my whole place, but start with my bedroom) and I have no clue when I am supposed to fit that in.
And then we are also supposed to dress well, be social, go on dates, workout and so much more. I just don’t know how we are supposed to do all this.
I’ve seen a few articles since New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern resigned about how women can’t really have it all (it was on the BBC, but interestingly when I went to link it I couldn’t find it and I found a lot more pieces about how we have to stop talking bout women “having it all”). And I don’t want to contribute to that narrative, but I don’t know if anyone, no matter the gender, can have it all.
This is basically a giant rant, so thank you for reading if you made it this far.
Laura
Thoughtful Millennial 
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