Last Week of July
Reflections on the past week month year - but it'll be short I promise! Plus a book and podcast recs for you.
Do you need to be someone important to do a newsletter? Can anyone write newsletters? I guess you need some news to share as it’s called a news-letter. My Sunday news today is reflections on July. Maybe it’s not a newsletter but more like a blog post? I’ll work on this and will get back to you.
July was…good. It was really good. For the past few months - I’d say since November - I’ve not been able to listen to myself. Or more like I’ve not let myself listen to myself. I think I’ve had my nervous system on alert mode all this time, hence why I felt like as if I couldn’t stop.
I’ve recently started working with a Life Coach, something that came in my life by chance and it’s been helping me a lot so far. I have discovered that I am always busy. Maybe this comes with no shock to others around me, but coming to this realisation by myself was really important. I love being busy, I have many passions and interests, and I don’t have other ways than always being on the go and have a packed schedule.
But oh my, I was tired. And I couldn’t figure out what to do. I’ve only had 3 sessions with my Life Coach and what I’m enjoying the most are the meditation and breath work. It is really allowing me to give myself the time I need to actively stop and focus. Focus because being so busy means my attention is in so many places at once: I am tutoring languages, applying for jobs, trying to make time for myself, trying to save quality time to spend with my partner and friends, making sure I still look after my health and fitness even though I’m feeling stressed, eating healthy otherwise this will contribute to poor mental health. How did we get to having to think about all of this?
This is the most important discovery I’ve made the past month: I want to be busy, but I want to focus on what I make myself busy with. What I mean is, I like tutoring, but tutoring is taking my time from other things I value more, like my degree or spending time learning about areas that could complement my degree. I enjoy writing itineraries and travel guides, but maybe I can start writing the ones of my future trips and put them together as I go, I don’t need to go back centuries and track all my previous trips to be able to “make it complete”. I wouldn’t have done that anyway, as I can’t recall information from all previous trips, but what I’m saying is that sometimes my brain needs to do things perfectly or in order and can’t start from a random point in time.
Anyway, I said I would keep this short. Regaining focus on what I want to be busy doing is what I have learnt the past couple of weeks. Putting this into practice is what I want to try in August.
Now, I know I’ve just blurbed out all my thoughts, but here are some things you can take away with you:
Read
Monsters - What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People? by Claire Dederer. This is what I’m reading at the moment and the book was chosen by my bookclub. It’s an essay about great art made by people who have done terrible things. Do we have to stop liking their art altogether or can we still like the art even though we don’t like the artist? It brings different opinions and POVs regarding the cancel culture and I’m not finding it judgmental.
Podcast
This is a great podcast for self empowerment, and the episode I shared is the one that made me realise my issue is not being busy, but it’s being busy with what doesn’t matter to my core which translated into distraction. There is a question in the middle of the episode that you can answer to yourself (I’m going to spoil it) and this episodes put you in a really good mental space to dig deeper into yourself. I hope you enjoy them.
Also I use Overcast, great app recommended by a lovely friend.
Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed reading my thoughts and reflections.
Lots of love,
Dona x
Dona I get the burnout with ‘being busy’. It’s nice to be able to stop, breath and focus. Can’t wait to hear more about how the work with your Life Coach goes!