Hi Everyone! I’m back today with a brand new post after taking a little bit of a blog break over the past couple of weeks. I don’t really have any “proper” reasoning for being a little quiet online lately, other than the fact that I think I’ve been feeling really run down over the past few weeks. Recently I haven’t been feeling 100% myself and for the first time in my life, I think being stressed out for a prolonged period of time started to have an effect on me physically. I can’t even count how many different ailments I’ve had recently, from aches and pains to little not-so-serious illnesses and I really was starting to feel that my body was starting to physically let me down. I was constantly exhausted,and now I finally understood the term “NYC Burnout”.
I’ve always been very honest about my love/hate relationship with New York here on the blog. While there are so many wonderful stereotypes about this city like “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere” and how it’s “the place where all of your dreams can come true”, I feel like it’s also a city that can take a lot out of a person if you let it! For me, my job is very demanding of my time and requires that “always on” attitude, which I’m not complaining about by the way, it’s something that I’m well used to by now. That said, I also think that very same attitude has made it very hard for me to relax and turn off in times when I would like to! For example, when Cathal and I went on a little trip to Nantucket this Summer, we both found it near impossible to relax. Always checking our phones and emails and struggling to really live in the moment and enjoy ourselves! While I almost expected it from myself, I was surprised to hear that Cathal felt the same way and it got me thinking that maybe it’s not just me and my job, it’s the New York lifestyle that’s made us like that! Something about this city makes you feel like no matter what you do, it’s never enough. You meet one goal, then it’s straight onto working towards the next one and with that frame of thinking everyone seems to become a workaholic.
Something else that I think ultimately contributed to my period of burn out was how fast time seems to pass by when you’re living and working in Manhattan. Genuinely the days melt into weeks and before you know it the next month is here, the season is over and you never text that person back or replied to that email or edited that YouTube video-which I PROMISE I’m going to start focusing on again soon! Despite my best intentions, I really felt like I didn’t have the time to keep up with all of these little tasks which really started to stress me out because like everyone, I want to be productive and get sh*t done!
Last week I stumbled upon a really good article on the Irish Times that really summed up how I feel, probably better than I can in my own words lol! The article titled “New York I Love You, But You’re Wearing Me Down” details how one woman living here finds it hard to keep up with the standard pace set here in the city and how it’s affected her. Here’s a segment from her piece that really resonated with me:
“I’ve come to realise that as long as I live in New York, my back will hurt. My skin will break out. I’ll always be tired. Days will melt into nights and weeks will speed into months and time will evaporate. Horns will honk and the sirens will never stop. Here I can do things I could never do at home, like, meet Gloria Steinem and Meryl Streep, or know where Pizza Rat lives. But it all comes at a price. It’s the New York tax: you can have it all, but to get it, it might take it all.”
So basically over the past couple of the weeks I’ve taken a little breather. I’ve been telling myself not to stress about blogging and being active on social media 24/7, I’ve been doing my best not to bring my work home with me in the evenings, I haven’t been forcing myself to get up at 5.30 to run in the park and do 5 pilates classes a week and I’ve started eating a lot healthier by cutting out sugar 6 days a week and thankfully I’m starting to feel a little less exhausted and a little better! I guess everyone can’t be at the top of their game 24/7 and sometimes the best thing to do is recognize that and sit one out every now and again!
Hope you guys will continue to bear with me! X
