Vacation?

My Feb. vacation started Tuesday night when I found out that we had a snow day the next day. I was so excited. I spend two whole days in my PJs doing nothing. Well, okay, that's not true. I read and practiced a lot. And I slept, which was needed. It was great. And so anyway, not I'm on vacation and it doesn't really feel like vacation. Every single minute of my week except next Sunday, the 21st is scheduled. And I'm not kidding. For example tomorrow: Wake up at 10. Eat breakfast, shower, change, read for AP Lit if I have time. Rehearsal from 12-3. Come home, warm up. Voice lesson from 3:30-4:30. After that work on my dance for my Muhlenberg audition and read more for AP Lit. Go out at night. It's insane. It's really confusing for me. I live my life on a busy schedule like this all the time. It's never really bothered me before. I guess that's because I always knew that I had vacations built into my year to take a week to relax. But this year those vacations don't exist. Just because I don't have school doesn't mean that I'm off. I still have school work to do along with other stuff. But the thing is, the other stuff, which I have always considered fun turns into something stressful. Like rehearsal, or going out with my friends, or going on an audition. That's ironic, isn't it? Going out with friends is supposed to be what people do to take a load off. In my case, it only adds madness and chaos. One of my best friends who I don't hang out with outside of dance texted me last night asking when I was free. I had to tell her I wasn't. I felt so bad saying no to her. Making plans, being social, is more stressful right now than anything else. There's something odd about that. These are all things which during the normal school year I enjoy and look forward to. But now my brain is telling me I'm supposed to be on vacation, relaxing, taking time off, and it's very confused by the fact that I'm not doing any of that. I guess I feel like because I don't have time to do nothing, I can't appreciate everything else that I want to enjoy doing. Does that make any sense? It's like too much of anything isn't good. I just want one week to relax. If I had that, I know I'd be able to appreciate everything else that I have to do and I would be able to enjoy it the way I always have. If I had one week off, I'd be able to spend it waiting in excited anticipation for when I could jump right back into everything.

There's also stuff going on outside of all this that is probably putting a lot of pressure on me in ways that I wish I didn't have to deal with. And the funny thing is, I'm not really dealing with these issues at all. I pretend they don't exist until suddenly it's staring me right in the face and I have no choice but to deal with it for a day. And when I do have to deal with it, it's like dead weight is being pounded all over me. I don't know how to describe it. It's exhausting. It's really hard for me to talk about so I don't talk much about it. As you can see right now, I haven't even said what's going on and I don't think I will just because I don't see the point in doing so. The odd thing is, this issue makes me think so much about things, one of which completely contradicts my entire first half of this blog/rant. I've been thinking a lot about being grateful for everything, and not taking anything for granted and maybe my ability to be busy is something I need to be a lot more grateful for. I know that this summer I will have lots of time to do what I want to do. And if I want to be busy, then I can be busy. If I want to take it easy, I can take it easy. I'm going to LA to stay with family for a week or two so it'll be really nice. That I can look forward to. I need to just take a big breath and know that everything will get done. It always does. I have no idea how, but I always manage. And usually I feel pretty good about myself afterwords. I also am usually really tired. But oh well.

Anyway as far as my issues go, I don't know how to handle them which means I'll just end up trying to ignore them like I've been doing. Except, I'm pretty sure that's not the best way to go about it. Because soon and I don't know how soon a bomb (figuratively speaking) is going to be dropped and then everything changes. I don't know how I'm going to feel once that happens. Part of me expects to feel relieved, although I feel like a terrible person for saying that. It's very hard to make sense of all this, although I completely understand what I'm saying and I guess that's really what matters. This has turned into some cyber self help therapy blog.

Or here's a new idea... Maybe the reason I'm so worked up about not having time to relax isn't because I actually need time to relax. Maybe it's because I need time to work out this issue that I'm dealing with. To actually sit down, face it, and come to terms with it. If I did that I'd probably feel a lot less cluttered about everything. It would just free up a lot of space. The only problem is I have no idea how to do that. And I'm a little tentative about doing it too.

Happy valentine's day!