Balancing all the various facets of my life has never been my strong suit; sometimes I manage better than others, but the fact remains that even during my “best” times I often joke about my life being a series of “short attention span theater” vignettes. I race around, wearing my various hats—I’m a mom! I’m a writer! I’m a wife! I’m a volunteer!—and if things are going relatively well, most everything gets done and I feel pretty good.

But right now I don’t feel good. In fact, I pretty much feel like crap all the time. I’m tired, I’m cranky, and the last however many months of stress have definitely left their mark. I’m working less, ostensibly to give me the time to take care of everything else, yet I feel like I’m accomplishing pretty much nothing in every area of my life, at the same time. (It’s a nifty party trick, if you feel like accompanying the final “TADA!” with a demonstration of exactly how long it’s been since you bothered to, say, dust your house.)

And then came the inevitable question: “What are you doing for you?”
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I am blogger, hear me… pimp myself?

In my experience, there are two kinds of bloggers out there: Those who write because they love writing, and those who write because they love attention. (Occasionally you find a third type: those who love writing and love attention, but overwhelmingly I would argue most bloggers are one or the other.) Now, you could make the argument that someone who only loves writing would never put their words “out there” for others to see, but to me having an audience reading what you write is part of the overall process. I love to write, but I also love to share that writing with others.

I don’t love attention so much, but of course to some extent it’s part and parcel of the blogging life. Put a website online and people are going to see it, comment on it, want to interact with you—that’s kind of the point. But as an introvert writing online suits me because I an interact with others in a way that’s limited; responding to comments and emails is easier for me that lots of face-to-face interaction.

Every now and then, I find myself receiving some sort of nomination or award and then I’m… deeply conflicted.
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I write for a living. I write online for a living. I write online about many very personal aspects of my life for a living.

But I don’t write about politics, particularly with a presidential election looming.

There are a lot of reasons for this, and most of them boil down to “I don’t wanna.” I feel like political opinions tend to be deeply personal and—for a lot of people, particularly people with whom I don’t agree—not necessarily based on facts, but on feelings; and I’m not in the business of trying to change people’s feelings. Also I dislike the kind of debate that tends to turn ugly and rarely actually changes anyone’s mind. I’m comfortable chronicling my day-to-day life, but I am not comfortable laying bare my political beliefs, essentially inviting people whose beliefs frighten me to attack my position.

I’m a wuss.

Okay, I really am kind of a wuss when it comes to public political debate, but I’m also someone who lives and works online and isn’t interested in being branded as an extremist.
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If you’re reading here and you’re a client of mine, allow me to assure you that absolutely nothing gets in the way of my productivity. Ever! When I have work to do, I just get it done, because I’m a professional. Yup. I am totally not distracted by the string of family crises that currently feels never-ending and completely soul-sucking, so no need to worry at all.

In fact, this post is not for you, because I wouldn’t know anything about distraction. Just move along, and I’ll have that work done for you in no time.

Ahem.

Are they gone? Is the coast clear?

Okay: In reality, the biggest productivity struggle I’m facing is not that time I’m actually unable to work because I’m attending to my children, various appointments, phone calls about the mounting medical bills, or any of that. The biggest struggle is my reaction to this stress, in that even when I have the time to work, my ability to focus is, shall we say, slightly impaired. Or, you know, completely obliterated. There’s something about stress and unhappiness that makes me highly distractible.
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Earlier today I was among a group of bloggers when someone asked if folks would be willing to share their most controversial posts. This led to what I felt was a really interesting discussion, both because the posts in question often surprised me (I had a hard time seeing why there would be any debate about several of them), and because time and again folks would respond by saying that they didn’t have any controversial posts.

In fact, multiple people said that they fear disagreement and/or drama, so they try very hard not to write anything that could offend.

It’s not that I have a problem with this viewpoint, per se, but it definitely got me thinking. Bloggers are usually folks with opinions—who reads blogs written by writers who don’t have strong feelings about things? That would probably be boring. And certainly bloggers are portrayed as loving the social media back-and-forth, if not a plain ol’ spotlight. So I started wondering how true that supposed archetype is, and where I fall within it.
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It used to be that I spent summer feeling pulled in twelve different directions; feeling like my kids weren’t getting enough of me, feeling like I never got enough work done, feeling anxious for school to start and then guilty that I wanted it to, etc.

This summer has been different for a variety of reasons. With one kid in the hospital, nothing feels normal, ever, and so our family has taken to referring to this time as The Summer That Wasn’t. Even if that wasn’t the case, though, my youngest is nearly a teenager—if I felt like I had to work a non-stop, “regular” schedule in the summer months, I could do that, now. There wouldn’t be any “Mom! Mom! Hey Mom! Moooooooom!” going on. (Okay, that’s a lie. That still happens, but when I tell him to stop he laughs instead of throwing himself to the floor for a tantrum. Heh.) Still, our family schedule is off and the beginning of school changes things.

This week my husband went back to teaching at the university and my son went back to attending our beloved “Hippie School” (a homeschool collab) three days each week. Yesterday and today I had the house to myself for the bulk of the day, and I was free to work unencumbered.
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As a brand new freelancer, it can feel like an endless dog-and-pony show of finding the kind of work you want, attempting to get the attention of the people who might hire you for said work, impressing those people once you have their attention, and building your resume up to the point where all of those things will ultimately land you some paying work.

Once you’re somewhat established, you spend less time looking for work, and more time doing work. Still, you have to spend some of your time looking for new work, because you need more clients.

As a veteran freelancer, if you’re lucky you pretty much don’t have to look anymore. You spend most of your time doing paying work. And then every so often new clients will find you, and they’re doing so because your reputation precedes you, and so they know who you are and what they want and why those two things might go together well.

For a long time I was in the “veteran freelancer” category where I didn’t need to look for work, and that was lovely, I won’t lie. But as I’ve pulled back on work some to tend to my family, I’m now back in an unfamiliar position: I need to relearn how to seek work opportunities.
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Here, let me sum up 80% of what is currently flooding my Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds for you:

“ZOMG BLOGHER IS THIS WEEK! WHAT DO I PACK? WHAT DO I WEAR! I’M SO NERVOUS! I’M SO EXCITED! NEW YORK CITY AHHHHHHH! MARTHA STEWART! BARACK OBAMA! BLOGHER, BLOGHER BLOGHER!”

So… yeah. In case you’re living under a rock, you might not know that the BlogHer 2012 conference is this week, and bloggers everywhere suddenly have extra social awkwardness coupled with nothing to wear.

I’ve always been a proponent of blog conferences as excellent opportunities to network, but I’ve never been shy about expressing my mixed feelings towards huge conferences like this one. They’re expecting something like 5,000 attendees, and that makes it an Event (capital E!) unlike a smaller gathering. It’s not for everyone, and even if it is for you and you’re the most extroverted socialite to walk the planet, it may have its moments of being overwhelming.

And no, I’m not going this year. But I have a few pointers for you whether you’re going or not.
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I think I’ve been pretty honest, both here and elsewhere, about how tough this year has been for my family. For months I think I tried to operate on the assumption that the Bad Stuff was temporary, and if I could just tough it out a little bit longer, things would go back to normal and that would be that. (Ah, naivete. I miss you!) By the time my kid ended in the hospital for the third time, though, it became clear that 1) this wasn’t going away and 2) any new normal we might someday attain would be very different.

During the first hospitalization I all but stopped working. Slowly, once my daughter was home again, I tried to pick up where I left off. Then she went back into the hospital and I stopped again. Then she was home but things were still busy and stressful and I really hadn’t even gotten my feet back under me when this last hospitalization happened, and now she’s been away for far too long and I’ve continued to struggle with finding that elusive groove where I can get stuff done.

I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on what my continued difficulty is—aside from “life kind of sucks and it’s hard to care about anything other than my child right now” which may be true, but doesn’t excuse me from working—but I accidentally figured out a way to jump-start myself again.
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Much as youth is wasted on the young, I firmly believe that naps are wasted on children. It takes being a harried adult to fully appreciate the luxury of being able to just stop whatever you’re doing and take a nice, relaxing rest if that’s what you need. Of course, by the time most of us would appreciate a daily siesta, there’s no time for that.

For me, sleep is my handiest barometer of my mental health. This is even more true now that I’m a freelancer; when I get into poor sleep habits as I work here from home, they’re all too easy to perpetuate because I don’t need to be commuting to work and sitting in a cubicle for eight hours. If I don’t sleep well at night nowadays, I actually can sneak a nap in more often than not… but it means I don’t get my work done when I should… which means I’m liable to stay up too late working… which leads to not getting enough sleep… which, hey, did I mention there’s a hole in the bucket? You get the idea.

Because this is an issue near and dear to my sleep-loving freelancer’s heart, I loved this recent guest post by Tania Dakka over at Problogger about sleep mistakes that negatively impact your blog.
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