Trying to catch my breath

The past three weeks have felt like a triathlon. Swim: Wading through the thick of New York summer for five days. One day break. Bike: Cycling around the National Mall with my friend who was visiting DC for four days. Two day break. Run: Hosting my family in DC for five days. 

All the while I’ve been supporting a few big projects at work and outside of work, doing a poorer job of it than I wish to, and I just don’t feel like I’ve had time to stop and catch my breath, to really be with myself and relax into my own thoughts. It’s like I’m eating and don’t have time to taste the food. 

I’ve been trying to unpack why it feels like I’m not adequately processing what’s happening, and I think it comes down to: I had a lot of space to breathe and reflect between Ireland and New York, and I was writing a lot, crystallizing what I thought and felt. Recording what’s going on and finding the words to capture it is like making sure I really taste my food. Otherwise I think it slips away, and then I get nervous I’ll forget all the beautiful, colorful things that have happened to me. This is, tragically, how I feel about the vibrant years I spent in college and on my gap years. There’s all this passive documentation and unorganized evidence from those years: photos, stuff, bank statements, even. But it’s mostly archaeological. The shit I value most is my old journal entries in Notion, which I made sporadically.

I also think it has something to do with feeling a lot at once — sometimes even feelings that appear contradictory at first, even if they're not — and they're all knotted together into some kind of big tangle that I don't have enough time to work through completely. I make a little progress, and then I have to do something else, and when I come back to it, I've forgotten what I was doing last, and the progress has been lost. 

Anyway. I have so much swimming around in my mind, so much I want to report, so much media that I don't want to lose. I'll get to them soon.