I have just given into creeping adulthood and actually decided to do something that I’ve been putting off for a year or so on the basis that it is totally insane and obnoxious: I have started scheduling free time, specifically, I am marking weekends in the calendar on which neither Andrew nor I will not commit to doing anything or going anywhere with anyone else. I’m aiming to do this once a month or so, because barring our trip to New Zealand (world’s smallest violin, I know) we haven’t had such a thing since June, and then before that April and only because I was in my post-recompression exercise and travel ban in April. And this is for me, a borderline introvert, and Andrew, who is so introverted that Myers-Briggs cannot distinguish him from a lifelong hermit.
Even sadder: the first weekend I could find to do such a thing is more than a month from now.
Also sad, although again more in a world’s smallest violin
kind of way: even on those weekends, we’re talking about squeezing some scuba in, which may not sound like such a big deal, but it’s 90 minutes commute each way to the beach from here, and also I have to re-plan all my diving around DCS first.
Clearly all this is very indulgent, but seriously, I feel like I haven’t really had much of a rest in my life since about the time we started planning our wedding, which was from about February last year. (We married in May last year, but that didn’t help because we just moved onto new time consuming challenges.) Partly it’s because I want to vanish into a PhD thesis pit like I want a whole in the head, but partly it’s because I have problems with saying no. But once a month I intend to practice. ‘NO, NO, NO, NO, NO’. Seems easy, right? I’m on the case.