Do you wish you were doing better at work? Maybe you wish you were making time to workout regularly? Or more calls back home to Mom, or more walks with your dog at the park? More time reading that book you keep wanting to get to? Tell me what parts of you that you wish were different.

At the end of the day, you have to choose what kind of broken you want to be. You can’t be the perfect employee and the perfect spouse and the perfect fitness guru and the perfect journaler. You don’t have time to do it all. No one does. And I’m tired of feeling like a failure because I can’t do all the things I want to do. I have so many goals and so many things I want to improve on, but I only have so much time. I’ve read all the efficiency books and tried all the scheduling hacks and my planner still only has 24 hours each day. Something has to give.

The most bitter part of this is that logically I know it doesn’t matter. I’ve missed goals before and no one yelled at me. I got another shot and I tried again and life moved on. I was the only one yelling at myself anyway, no one else was holding me to the insane standards I asked of myself. And yet I do it over and over again. It’s the worst merry-go-round that I can’t exit.

Any sane person could tell you that you’re not a failure just because you missed 1 out of 10 of your goals. That’s not how life works. You’re not either a success or a failure. You’re just a human and you feel good when you make progress and you feel gross when you’re stagnant. And that’s why I’m trying to reframe this for myself. I can pick what my most important goal is, I can put most of my time towards that, but there just isn’t enough of me to do every single thing I want to do. You have to be okay with letting some things go. Because some things will always slip through the cracks, and either you accept that as reality or you blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault. Clearly the latter doesn’t do anyone any favors.

So if you’re at the end of a long week and you did the best you could, I’m talking to you. If you had to put out a big fire in your life and you couldn’t accomplish anything else, I’m talking to you. If the only thing you succeeded in today was deciding to stay alive and it took everything you had, I’m talking to you.

You made the right choice, and I’m glad you did.

We just can’t do it all. We cannot fix everything and we cannot live up to every dream we have for ourselves. We just have to do the best we can on the most important stuff and try again tomorrow. You have to choose what is priority 1 and what is everything else. It’s okay to feel broken on priorities 2-999. They can wait for tomorrow. You only have one of you and it’s not your fault that the best you can do is one thing at a time. 

Are you actually broken? Of course not. But it probably feels like it, and that’s what it means to be a human in the 21st century. There’s so much expected of us and so many things ask for our time and attention. We can only do so much. So have some compassion for yourself when your tank reaches empty. You were never broken, there’s just some work that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Further Reading: If this post resonated with you then I highly recommend you try The Self Authoring program. It’s a series of prompts that guide you through processing your past, present and future. The questions are compiled by researchers and they gave me a lot of clarity on how the chapters of my life shaped my mindset and fears. They showed me I wasn’t just an introverted, anxious, broken person, but how I’ve had to gradually heal trauma from early in my life and some scars last longer than others. They gave me compassion for myself because I saw reasons for why I am the way I am. Maybe they can do that for you too.