I’ve a bit overworked, burned out as it were. Now, as we discussed yesterday, the end is in site and hopefully the summer will be a little less jam packed with work and stress. But I haven’t gotten a lot of time to do anything leisure related, anything for “me” or even for “us” for that matter if I may include my wonderful husband. And I know I was getting into this situation when I chose this career path, I’m not complaining. But no matter how much you like what you are doing, too much is, well, too much.

And then there is writing. It is, as always, sadly the lowest priority. Now before you wave your copies of every writing book ever in my face, understand that I do write, any reader of this blog knows I fit it in. But on any given day, if there is Real Work to be done or writing, writing will come second. And if there is some free time, do I use it for much needed time off or force myself to write? Well, it depends on the day. If free time were to appear today, it would be used for “me,” I’m not embarrassed to admit.

But I hate not getting a chance to write or have “me” time and the absence of it does put me in a little bit of a funk. But, in this case, a small burst of confidence came from a very unlikely source.

My brother needed help with his resume (making it shorter). I have written all previous versions of his resume for him so he came to me. But he came to me the day before he needed it and I simply did not have time to do more work on it with all the other stuff I had to do that day. I detailed what I thought he should do but I felt extremely guilty the whole day because I felt like I should have dropped my work to do it for him. (Yes, there are weird deep rooted issues going on in this, I realize.)

So my father is working on the resume instead and asks me for some advice with it. So the guilt is just really piling up. I feel bad that my father is having to do the work because I said no. I keep thinking of all the things I should be doing, for my family, for my job, for myself and I’m just ready to snap. Guilt is pretty much the national currency of the nation that is my family, both real and imagined.

My father is asking me a few general questions and I just want to run away when he asks me who wrote all the bullet points on the resume. I tell him that I originally wrote the bullet points but my brother may have changed them, I don’t know. From the way he said it, I thought he was going to follow up with “because they are terrible.” Instead he says that my brother said he didn’t edit anything so I say, well then yes, I wrote them. Why?

“Well… it’s just that…” my father starts to say and I figure he’s going to say something about how terrible they are and instead he says, “They’re the part I’m having the most trouble with.”

Me: “How so?”

“Well, I don’t know what to do with them. There are all, really, excellent so I can’t imagine cutting any of them out. So I don’t know how to make this shorter. They are all really good.”

This was a small thing, a small moment. My father was not trying to pay me a compliment, he was legitimately stuck on how to shorten the resume. If anything, he said it distractedly. But when I was second guessing everything, being told something I wrote (even something as boring as resume stuff) was that good, just really made me feel so much better.

Not sure what the lesson to take away from this is but I’ve been holding onto that small thing all day.