The Balancing Act

It’s hard to find the balance between your job and your career especially when the two don’t go hand in hand.  The job seems to always take precedence over the career because it is, after all, how you manage to pay the bills and put food on the table for you and your family.  It’s nice when our career and our job are one in the same but what do you do if they aren’t?  If your job takes up so much of your time and you can’t seem to balance it with your career then how will you ever reach the point where you make your career your job? 

As a writer who would love to be a stay at home writer and mom I find having a full time job highly disruptive to my creative thought process.  It seems like I would have the time when I get home to write and work on whatever projects I have to work on but after picking up my daughter, getting her home, fed, bathed, and ready for bed and getting myself ready to do the same thing all over again the next day I find that I am way to tired to stay focused on my writing which is my dream.  I kept waiting for me to get adjusted to my new schedule so that I could incorporate my writing time in there with the rest of my day but I am beginning to realize that being adjusted to a hectic schedule is more of an ideal then a reality.  It’s up to me to MAKE myself adjusted and if the sacrifice happens to be sleep or the TV or even talking on the telephone then so be it. 

I read about the writers who have sacrificed so much for their craft and I wonder why even though I say I am willing to make those sacrifices, when the time comes to actually make them I seem to fall short.  I guess it’s just a matter of whether I am really as serious about my writing as I say I am and the answer to that question is definitely a yes.  Now I just have to work everything in and if the thing that I have to give up a little of is sleep or other social activities that disrupt my writing time then I think that to accomplish the dreams I set out to accomplish it is well worth it.   

There are many steps in balancing your life out such as setting deadlines for yourself, and organizing your work and your goals but the first step is to see what it is that you are spending your time doing.  Making a schedule of what your day normally looks like is helpful because then you can see where you could actually be writing instead wasting your time on other frivolous things.  Once you do that then you can make a new schedule that involves more writing then television watching or talking on the telephone.  You can’t get anywhere with your work without giving up some old bad habits.  

I guess finding a balance between your job and your career and making the two work together requires you to re-focus and re-prioritize and make yourself see what is most important to you.  I just know that I don’t want to find myself, ten years later, wondering why it took me so long to get anything accomplished and looking back to find that the hold up and the problem all along was me not being focused enough and sacrificing enough to find that balance.  All that life has become, or anything that you do in your life, is a balancing act. It’s a constant everyday test as to whether you can really multi-task and do everything without letting yourself get distracted.  And even though it may seem easy to stay focused on something that you know you want so bad, it is anything but easy.  But it will almost certainly turn out to be well worth all of the sacrifices that you made to get where you are destined to be.       

Jimmetta Carpenter