The Need to Get All Things Done

Have you ever felt the urgency to get things all done at once? Well, lately I've felt that way, and it's not that I haven't felt that before, it's just that this time its intensity increased. Perhaps it is because I'm on vacation and I don't have school obligations yet and that caused the need to accomplish those things to become stronger. But honestly, even though I'm on vacation, I still have a lot of things to do, and naturally, I don't have an excuse to skip my household chores. And so I really need to do all of them.

However, before vacation came up, I already planned the things I needed to do, plus the things I failed to accomplish on last year's vacation. So I ended up getting pretty loaded...a day wouldn't pass without me doing something. Instead of having a great rest during my vacation months, I ended up getting busier. Some opportunities came my way, so I ended up taking them as well. That's why up until now I still haven't done all of them, and just thinking about them made me quite frustrated. I badly wanted to finish them all, but now that I'm in the second week of July, and almost just a month before our classes start, I realized that accomplishing them all would be an impossible feat.

Of course, I'm upset and I wouldn't deny it because I planned it months before the vacation started. But what can I do if my schedule—and even my body can't bear those expectations? Supposedly, a week ago, I was still positive that I could accomplish them before this month ends, but with unexpected activities that came in—like my tutorial sessions and sudden additional household chores I needed to do—accomplishing all of those became quite impossible.

Also, I experienced a real nasty cold, and if I didn't have a draft with my review, I wouldn't have posted anything yesterday. I sneezed a lot of times to the point that my nose became runny and sore, but I can't relax yet because I have a tutorial session to attend. And so I tried my best not to sneeze my nose out while teaching my student. Thankfully, my nose cooperated, and the session ended with me not sneezing, and because of that experience, a realization dawned in me.

I can't do these things all at one month.

No matter how hard I try or no matter how much I gaslight myself that I can finish them in time, there are things that I can't do this time. This isn't the first time I've come to this realization, but along the way, I somehow forgot that realization because I became too full of myself again. Trusting ourselves isn't a bad thing, but forcing ourselves to do things that we know we can't is self-destruction. I realized that working too much puts a lot of pressure on me, and given my condition now—even a slight stressor could trigger my defective odd immune system.

Along with that realization, I decided to just accomplish the things I can during this month, and continue what wasn't done in the next months coming. For some time, due to my preoccupied schedule, I forgot to feel and enjoy the things I do because I'm too eager to get all things done at once, and that eventually became the bane of my happiness because instead of feeling accomplished and satisfied, I look forward again to accomplishing another thing to do.

That cycle goes on and on until I feel drained and my body complains. That's why I realized to do things at my pace and also to don't let those things dictate my pace, for if I don't, I know it won't be long before I'll be forced to go back to those bitter and tedious treatments, and I definitely don't want to go back during those times. It's time to apply those learned lessons again before it's too late.