Hello everyone!

As I have mentioned a few times on this blog in the past, I write all of my posts for an upcoming week the weekend beforehand, scheduling them to go up in advance. The day this post will go up is my last day of winter break, when I will most likely be writing my posts to go up the following week. You may be thinking, why would I bring this up? Well, there’s a few reasons. Winter break flew by, and I had all these expectations of things I could get done: tons of volunteer opportunities, tons of homework and extra credit assignments, studying for finals, holiday parties and fun plans with friends and family, summer program applications, blogging, cleaning, and writing with the intention of submitting to competitions.

Yes, it sounds like a lot- but 16 days of no school also sounded like a lot of time to do it all. To no one’s surprise (not even really my own), I wasn’t able to do everything. Time flew by, slipped through my fingers, and what I thought was a huge chunk of time still wasn’t enough to do everything I thought I could, regardless of how productive I was or wasn’t. I always feel like time is passing me by because I just want to do so much, and even at my highest levels of productivity and motivation, it’s impossible to do it all. Balancing fun things and obligations and things that fall under both categories is a lot no matter who you are, but I’ve also found that I almost want to overload myself since there’s so many things I’m interested in and I constantly discover new things I want to be a part of or think of ideas I would like to execute.

I don’t know whether to blame myself for time management issues, or blame myself for having unrealistic expectations- maybe I should be doing both? I would make a list of things I wanted to get done each individual day and I would take everything one step at a time, but I just never ended up knocking enough things off the list. I guess the “culprit” could’ve been the fact that I made a lot of plans with friends, but it’s winter break and the holiday season; it was kind of a given that I would be going to holiday parties and such. I shouldn’t feel guilty for wanting to be social on one of the only substantial breaks from school of the year. On a normal weekend, I don’t see my friends at all- I’m shut up in my room doing homework and other work on my computer or writing, and then I’ll possibly go out for food and volunteering. I knew there wasn’t going to be another opportunity for me to have this much time to just do something fun, so I said yes to all the plans my friends asked me to participate in.

It scares me how fast time has been passing in general. My first semester finals are in a couple weeks (a huge reason why I had so much work over break), and that means I’m about to be halfway done with sophomore year. I had so many plans and ideas and thoughts about how I wanted to approach this year, and it’s flown by so fast that I couldn’t even try to implement most of them. Sure, I’ve had a full schedule and it’s not like I was being lazy, but I’m confused how I never have time to do anything. How do some people have time to manage a full and difficult course load, a social life, their hobbies, and tons of other random activities and responsibilities both inside and outside of school? I’m managing things okay, but not with a good balance between work and play, and with barely any extra breathing room.

This is more of a question almost than a real post. I’ve offered my situation and my thoughts for you to mull over, and now I’m asking: what am I doing wrong? Am I doing anything wrong? Are any of you experiencing the same thing? Feel free to let me know, we’re all in this together!

Brooke