Having ME Time is exponentially more valuable now that I’m a parent. This morning, I was gifted an extra two hours of ME time thanks to a two-hour delayed opening at my office. I debated going into the office early, but rejected that idea quickly. Our friend comes to the house every Tuesday to watch Teddy and her son, so extra Teddy time was out. It’s miserably cold outside (hence the two-hour delay) so taking a walk or a jog is out. Inevitably I end up spending my ME time doing one of my two favorite things: reading or writing.
On weekend days, Teddy naps for an hour or two in the afternoon. That’s a solid chunk of ME time, and I usually set it aside for reading or writing.
The thing is – I feel a little guilty when I decide to read instead of write. If writing’s my dream, and I need practice and commitment and hard work to achieve my dream, then shouldn’t I focus on that for all or most of my precious ME time?
No. Reading is my inhale and writing is my exhale. If I never inhale, how can I exhale? If I never read, how do I feed the part of me that fell so in love with the written word that I feel compelled to write myself?
This weekend, I experienced this conflict, and ended up typing away on the blog and taking little breaks to read. It helped that the book I was reading was Story Craft, a nonfiction book about writing narrative nonfiction stories. It feeds both my love of reading and my motivation to get better at writing.
