Neurotic Do Bee Syndrome.

I've ALWAYS been the good little Do Bee, never a Don't Bee, and I pretty much grew up into a Neurotic Bee.  (The fact that the Universe kept piling on actual, serious things for me to fret about certainly didn't help that tendency.)  Now, I'm in a career where I have to draw my own lines, figure out my own working hours, and give myself permission to turn off work thoughts and give myself some down time, and I can already see that this is going to be hard for me.

I'm a fretter by nature, and it took years of conscious effort to learn to leave work at work - and then what did I do? I took a job where work often happens outside 8-5, Monday through Friday.  This is fine if you are good at drawing lines between your working life and private life, but that's something I still need to master.  I seem to be booked solid for the next five days, and that's if nothing else comes up to add to the calendar.  (I wish this was all that fancy TV Real Estate Lady stuff of lunches with clients followed by writing contracts for big expensive homes, but in my case it's just all the unpaid, unglamorous grunt work of prospecting and market research.)

I am setting my own boundaries.  From 8 p.m. until 8 a.m. is a No Real Estate Zone - at least, not unless I have a legitimate emergency to deal with, and then the rule will be bent on a case by case basis.  I need to do this, because if I don't force myself to Not Think about Work, I'll start waking up at 3 a.m. to check on something I just thought of, and down that road lies burnout.   I already have caught myself waking up at 3 a.m. to fret over imaginary issues, and realized that I do it when I've allowed work to creep into evening down time.  My tightly wound, fretful brain needs to unwind at the end of the day.

It was so funny today - it was the first day of boot camp, there's a ton of work involved in this program and our trainer is assigning "accountability partners". She was describing how she's going to do it, and said that she's not going to put, say, A and B together, because they're both chatty and softies and cut each other slack and they'd talk about their kids and their kittens and next thing you know they'll be crying about Publix commercials.  She identified me and the ex-Army guy as her "no nonsense" business types - I suspect we'll be assigned softies to beat up.  God, I hope not.  It takes a lot of work to be this business person, and I don't have it in me to nurture somebody else right now.  But I did think it's funny that this is the image I project to the world at large, when in reality I'm a neurotic little Do Bee who wakes up at 3 a.m. feeling like I must have forgotten to do something really, really important, and imagining all the things that might go wrong.

Knitting to the rescue.  I'm working on the blankie I started for Miss D back shortly before she was born I think.  (Ahem,  I've been busy, and anyway it's in the 90s here and it's not like she needed it. ) I've discovered that the advice they give in those helpful articles we read and forget is true - if I turn off the computer and knit in the evenings, I really do sleep better.  I'm a believer!  Even if it's charity baby blankets because I don't have the brain cells for anything more complicated, I swear this neurotic Do Bee is going to make time to knit.