Balancing plates

Have you ever seen someone practice plate spinning? The juggler seems almost to defy gravity as they maintain the plates’ precarious balance with a combination of skill, speed, and occasional trickery. That’s almost how my life feels at times.

I’ve talked about my “social media Monday’s” before… well, they got much worse after I published my book, and now I’m working on creating a slightly more sustainable system. Rather than packing all of my social media prep into one mega day, I’m going to try to stay a single day ahead of the game, IE, every Monday I prep for my blog, and nothing else, and so on. 

How many plates do I need to balance on a daily basis? I need to split my time between the living room, (my wall desk collapsed rather dramatically onto me a few weeks ago) and “kitten central” (my brother’s room) as we’re not quite ready to let him roam freely with the dog yet, and we can’t leave him alone for more than 2 hours lest he start crying for attention. This may seem random but it’s a little harder to work when you have a kitten doing gymnastics off of your leg, then when you can just sit and write; I can write around him (most of the time) but only if I flip the laptop over to tablet mode, (loud buttons are far too tempting to a little kitten) and I’m not quite used to using a digital keyboard for working on my book yet.

Obviously, I have to do all those little things that keep me healthy, as we all do, such as brushing my teeth, doing my exercises, and trying to consume a healthy amount of water. And I do have a few things in my regular calendar as well, such as small group; but I’m only going to talk about repeating things, that you may not automatically assume. My daily task list includes: writing 2-3 pages in my book, writing/prepping for the next day’s social media promotion, a devotional, a Bible study, monitoring my seller accounts on Etsy and Amazon, playing with/snuggling Berlioz, trying to make sure Spirit doesn’t feel left out and cleaning at least one thing (sometimes this is sweeping the floors, sometimes it’s putting away stray items around the house). And soon, I’ll be adding daily voice work practice (recording and editing audio) to this list, and if I ever make any sales, I’ll need to add making more jewelry to keep my Etsy stock up as well. 

This list could definitely be longer… but it’s daunting to even look at first thing in the morning, especially when I add all the little daily things that come up, from a walk outside to bathing the dog. Right now, I’m just tired; tired of working to seemingly no avail, my Etsy shop has been open since February, and I have yet to make a single sale, and my book has been out for nearly a month now, and I’ve sold all of 4 copies. It feels like I’m breaking my back for no purpose, promoting products that no one wants, and writing books that few will ever see. I haven’t talked about this much, but it took a lot of time and effort to design and make all of those necklaces and earrings… to learn how to set up a business, and I’m now afraid that I wasted most of that time.

Sorry for the downer, but this is life, not perfectly shiny all the time… and sometimes it’s hard. Tomorrow will likely be better, but today I’m tired and sick of waiting for a result.

Thanks for the read.