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Hey there friends, before I even begin as to where I’ve been: first things first…I’ve been SO! DANG! FRUSTRATED! With the blog logistical world this past month. I had such a fun Valentine’s Day post I wanted to go up that week with such a cute little gift guide widget. Well, turns out the hosting I use doesn’t accommodate to the widget I created. Turns out I have zero clue how to properly find hosting that does and when I do turns out I have zero clue how to install it. So, moral of the pretty pathetic sounding story: most of the time I have ZERO CLUE what I am doing!!!!!!!!!! (just incase any of you needed a friend in knowing you also have zero clue what’s going on at this point in life)

So I’m about to just go out on a limb here and start off the meat of this blog post by quoting The Office; but I feel like not too many people will be TOO upset by that. Anyways,

“I hate the idea that someone out there hates me”

HEY PAM!! SAME GIRL!!! ME TOO!!! I FEEL YA!!! I FEEL YA LITERALLY EVERY SECOND OF EVERYDAY WOW OH WOW!! But really, I think I have said this exact thing countless times and it never fails to resonate with me time and time again.  I will admit it with everything I do, and I know I am not alone, I am your textbook definition of a people pleaser. I absolutely despise nothing more than saying the word “no” to people. It physically pains me and not having an answer for people’s questions or solutions to people’s problems? I think I literally start itching and contract a fever. Okay, slightly dramatic, but you all know who you’re dealing with here. However, I am starting to realize how highly this is affecting not only me, but the people around me, AND the people I am saying “yes” to over and over again.

I am the type of person that can get so easily caught up in the billions of things she has to do that at one point finally just crashes. I thrive on a busy schedule and much prefer to be doing a billion things and have a never-ending to-do list in my agenda. Free time honestly scares me a bit because I’ll be honest with myself, unless I have planned out what I have to get done, nothing will get done, and then the stressed and flustered cycle continues. I know what you’re thinking: “we get it, you’re busy…so what?”

I started a little tradition with myself my junior year of high school back when I started this lil piece of the web in which every start of the month I look back and find one “good” adjective and one “bad” adjective to describe how I feel I performed as a human bean the past month. This past month the only word I could come up with was BUSY. I honestly didn’t even know whether to include it in the good or bad and became super concerned as to how I was spending my time. Not that anything I was doing was things I regret doing whatsoever, instead I was just finding myself fueling up with business instead of taking the chance to breathe at times. I wasn’t even doing things that I was necessarily proud of or that made me happy. My creativity levels were at an all-time high. But my brain was a constant battle of “omg-ally-you-need-to-do-this-like-right-now-immediately” and “omg-ally-for-the-love-of-god-why-are-you-doing-nothing” and also “omg-ally-please-nap” (mainly that last one.) 

& here we reached the peak of my people pleasing busy achieving problems: when you continuously are trying to do things for others, there comes a point in which you have done so little to get your own shiz done that you become almost detrimental to yourself and the people you are trying to HELP. Aka the literal OPPOSITE of what you put yourself into this situation to do in the first place. Funny how that works. Ya walk in with good intentions to make everyone happy and sprint out 4 hours later than you planned, looking dishelved, probably dehydrated, and now realizing your “free evening” you thought you had was filled with smaller tasks of things you probably didn’t even NEED to be doing. But something along the lines of “sure no problem!” slipped your mouth and the gratification of saying yes to something, aka crack for people pleasers, determined your plans for the night instead. You also get super frustrated because you want to be doing fourteen billion different things but refuse to excetue them unless they’re perfect an so they just never end up happening which frustrates you even more (oh, idk, this blog post included?!) Sound familiar? To most of you, probably. Don’t I sound like a blast and a half to be around?!! Ha, hence why this is being written.

After finishing up Rock Chalk Revue about a week ago, I’ve gained a majority of my free time back and didn’t realize how much of it I was using while running the show. It’s been less than a week, but myself, and multiple people close to me, have realized how big of a difference I have had in my priorities and my emotions. Realizing that, sure, I’m probably always going to be someone that thrives on being busy is one thing. But understanding WHAT I want to be putting my busy energy into and WHY I’m doing it is entirely another.

To be quite honest with you all, nothing is more exhausting than feeling like you’ve been trying to get your shiz together for YEARS. It’s almost like life lately has just been one big oh if I get x y and z completed THEN I will be this super cool shining star that can wear dresses and tennis shoes in the middle of the street like I spend hours staring at on my Pinterest feed every night. Realizing that I will NEVER have my shiz together is something I’ve accomplished this past week. Realizing that no matter how many positions I hold, how many meetings I can fit into my schedule, or how many trends I can manage to keep up with will never make me feel accomplished finally settled in.

I found myself with my best friend the other day and both of us were talking about how good it felt to be able to just be so content doing NOTHING together and I couldn’t thank her enough for that comment. We had both made time in our schedules to spend time doing absolutely nothing and I can vouch for the fact that both of us were happier than we had been in a LONG (and busy) time. THAT’S where i want to be shoving that energy. I don’t want to stop saying “no” completely, that will never happen. But I DO want to start saying “yes” to the things that make me happy. Yes to taking time to write every day and express emotion. Yes to talking things out and having real and genuine conversations with human beans I care about. Yes to doing things for others, but only if I have done a mental check to see if that not only fits in my physical time schedule but my mental sanity schedule as well, instead of just saying yes for the sake of it, especially if there was someone that could’ve done the job better.

A few ground rules and reminders I’m setting for myself and all of you out there as well: you are NOT an unlimited resource, if your yes for something is anything LESS than crazy enthusiastic if it is something you don’t HAVE to do…maybe it should be a no, SAYING NO DOESN’T MAKE YOU A MEAN PERSON! THIS IS A BIG ONE FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO ARE TERRIFIED OF BEING MEAN! and last but not least, not being able to do everything doesn’t make you any less of an achieving goal getting superwoman. In fact, being able to recognize when you should say no is actually hella strong and very superwoman like within itself.

Oh hey there, multiple rambly paragraphs later! Sup! Did you make it through that alive? Did you at least grab a snack for the read once you got a sentence in and realized it was one of Ally’s never-ending word vomits? Let’s hope. Well, that’s a wrap for tonight. It’s 8:35 pm on a Friday night and the newest episode of Riverdale and my bed await. Don’t forget: let’s practice making intentional choices on where you put your time, energy, and attention to where it will feel meaningful to YOU.

& as always, until next time, xoxo, Ally