Everyone's Needs, and Mine

I've spent a lot of accidental time in the last few days with my friends. You know, not the kind of time where I'd planned to be with them or planned to have leisure or social time. The kind where I'd planned to do something else and people presented themselves to have fun with or showed up with needs.

I missed that spontaneity, that consistent demand for my attention, when I was at home over the summer. There, it's like I always have to seek out my social opportunities. It gets a bit taxing because I feel like I'm forcing myself on people. Here, they fall in my lap whether I want them or not.

I should learn to create more of a balance between those two things, though. It's true that when I'm always the seeker I get lonely and frustrated, but when I'm always in demand I feel very much overwhelmed. I forgot about that over the summer, the feeling of being overstretched and over-needed. I have trouble setting aside enough time for myself because I always do want to be with my friends or help them when they're distressed.

My new goal is to write every day in this blog. I want to push myself to create space for that, to give myself time to reflect and write. It's important to me that my output has some quality, so I'm just going to have to make the time for it. It's a nice extra incentive to give myself some space.