Learning to Make a Hat

When you are a full-time writer, who loves to read, and who loves to write for fun, but you also make your LIVING at it, sometimes, it seems like your entire world is writing and reading.

As some of my regular blog readers know, the last month or so has been in a word . . . a bitch. I am exhausted, stressed, having memory issues BECAUSE I am so stressed, like walking into the same room five times, forgetting why the hell I was going there in the first place.

Now my parents are visiting and I am getting less sleep than ever. They are night owls. I usually am in bed by ten p.m., but I am staying up late to spend time with them--but still getting up before dawn with the kids while my parents sleep in until 9:00 a.m. I am to the point where sometimes I even wonder if I am making sense when I speak because I am so tired.

BUT . . . one really great thing is happening.

I love to knit. LOVE it. So far, knitting in my world has consisted of making very lopsided scarves with holes where there shouldn't be any. After a while, I mastered scarves that AREN'T lopsided, and they have no dropped stitches. So I decided to up my repertoire to make a hat and a blanket. But this isn't something I find "easy." I can't learn by reading. I have to learn by DOING, and thus I need a knitting mentor to guide me through Hatmaking 101.

Enter Mom. I am halfway through making a hat with three different colors of yarn for my baby. And as she walks me through how to switch out stitches and yarns and master a more complicated project . . . I am reminded how much I ADORE knitting. I haven't knit a thing since Christmas--too busy. Too tired. All the excuses.

But sitting with her until late each night, making a hat, I am reminded that, tired as I am, making time for nonwriting things, nonreading things, is important. It staves off burnout. My garden is also something I adore for the same reason.

So, writers and readers, do you find you have to make time for hobbies so you don't get too burned out? And what hobbies do you have? And do you have to FORCE yourself to make time for them? I wonder, too, if I feel this way because I make a LIVING as a writer and it doesn't seem like a hobby anymore, but something that has to be worked like a business at times, much as I love it.