What the heck have I been doing the past 18 months? I’ve been *busy* — to the point of burnout and exhaustion. I don’t know how I got through the latter months of 2022 as they were some of the hardest I’ve faced. Last year I was focused on recalibrating how I spend my time, trying to find a better balance. As a result I spent a lot of time on my sofa in the evenings, just dealing with the reverberating burnout.
Between March of 2022 and April of 2023, I gained the responsibilty of elder care for my father. To condense the tale, I discovered he was not in good health in March of 2022 and after making sure he wasn’t evicted in September, managed to get his health checked in October which resulted in his being hospitalized. We were able to get him back to some level of normalcy and then into long term care in March of 2023, then I spent April clearing out his apartment. He’s now settled but I still have regular responsibilities for him and for my mother, who is still living in her condo but requires daily assistance.
I also took on more labour activist roles in my own local and outside my local in 2021-22 but dropped one hat in 2023. In January 2023, I took over as supervisor in the department where I’ve worked for 15 years when my supervisor retired. I still managed to perform a few times, getting in more drag performances as well as some burlesque (including my first out-of-town show in Vancouver), and I managed to co-produce a show in the fall of 2023.
So with my free time, I’ve mostly watched movies but I want to shift that this year. I barely managed to read 15 books last year, down from my typical 25-30 on average.
In 2023, I watched a LOT of movies. In part, this was with the knowledge that Pic-A-Flic, our last dedicated film rental store in Victoria, was set to close in September and that my days of renting stacks of videos from the far flung corners of the world, from every era, and from weird cult niches, were numbered. Then in November, I reconfigured my streaming services and cable options so that I could find *most* films I wanted to see.
I watch films because they take a couple of hours and I don’t always need to give them my full attention, unlike books which require a kind of focus I have found very difficult to manifest in the last couple of years.
Many of the books I did read were because of a little far-flung group of us created a little ad-hoc reading group. We take turns choosing the books, mostly literary fiction but we do mix things up from time to time. This got me back into bookstores, and checking libraries, and just being on the lookout for books. This Christmas I focused a lot of my self-gift-giving on books — ordering several titles from small presses, and after Christmas I bought even more.
We are still doing the book club but it’s become a little more intermittent (we won’t be talking about November’s pick until the end of January, for example) and I need to challenge myself more than one book per month. So I’m doing two things: I’m upping my goal from 15 to 21 books this year and to help, I’ve created a bingo card for myself, and I’m sharing it here if you wanna play along — I find gamifying my reading really helps motivate me.
But where am I going to find the time? I’m going to try and steal it from my YouTube time (I watch WAY too many hours on there) and my endless scrolling and casual gaming. The way I use my discretionary time has become problematic. I am not getting the kind of enrichment I need when I spend an evening scrolling, viewing YouTube videos about YouTube drama, and sorting colors into tubes.
I am drawn to pulling myself out of this doom-loop this year, as the next step in healing from burnout. Shifting my media intake from short form scrolling to reading may be enough to help me reconfigure my free time/me time into something more fulfiling.
P.S.: here’s a PDF if you wanna print your own copy of my book bingo card and play along