Cheers to the Soft Life

I like to think of my life as a fishbowl, a small part of the very vast ocean of life. It holds a lot of things I am very proud of: my skills and talents, my family, my hopes and dreams, my books, my friends…and my YouTube subscription page. It seems odd, being proud of the selection of YouTube pages you follow. But when you find pages that represent who you are and who you want to be so accurately in the ersatz world of social media, it is a thing of joy.

On my subscription list, I have the funny and the philosophical, the psychological and the fit, the instructional, the nutritional, and the motivational.

I have pages that help my craft, some for languages and others for personal development. Some for beauty, others for health and spiritual growth, and others that are not what one would typically expect me to follow.

Like a beautiful portrait filled with shades, there is a shadow side to my eclectic and interesting subscription page. As wild an assumption as it might be, I believe this disadvantage plagues most people. When you have a subscription list like mine and a willingness to be better today than you were yesterday, it becomes easy to fall into what I call the DIA trap.

The Do-It-All trap.

Think of this trap as trying to be on a first-name basis with everyone in your school. It seems doable at first, but it is exhausting, a recipe for burnout (and failure) and a perfect route to self-sabotage.

You want all the staycations and exotic trips that your favorite lifestyle influencer takes.

You want all the lines of (expensive) skincare and haircare products that your skin and hair influencers have — and even adopt their complex regimens.

You want a pantry and a kitchen that rivals that of your favorite food vlogger and are the thought of making pizza… from scratch, is something that appeals to you

Or maybe you want the fancy home workout set, cutesy (and expensive) workout outfits, and pricey gym membership your fave fitfluencer has and are excited to go beast mode on this revenge body business.

I don’t think of myself as a Type A personality, but I am a bit of a “doing” person. While I love stillness and calm, I like the constant motion (mental, locomotory) that comes with doing things. That’s probably one reason I am rarely bored. Even when it seems like I am not doing anything, I am doing something; I still draw ripples of motion in stillness. And like wheels on a car, my subscription page propelled this innate love (and need) for motion. Unfortunately, motion comes with wear and tear.

The reality that I was doing too much came to me in slices with the first slice being during a conversation with my cousin, Ogo. We were talking about hair and the protective styling of natural hair. For hair, she is very minimalist. Conversely, I can be very maximalist. I casually told her I wanted to try doing a full head of box braids on my hair. This proclamation was met with the explanation, “Ka gini wee mee? I can’t try that o abeg. E jiro afufu aña isi.” (So that what will happen? Please, I can’t try that. One shouldn’t glorify suffering.)

As commonsensical as that reality was, before then, it was totally lost on me. The way I saw it, doing it all, all by yourself and all the time, was something to be proud of. But apparently, it wasn’t.

Another slice came through the re-evaluation of my workout schedule. The gym fits in perfectly with my need for activity. I am that person who goes to the gym when she is tired or has cramps from hell. Know that person who goes to the gym during national holidays and Valentine’s day? I am that person. In the Christmas week of 2018, I remember a one-time receptionist at my gym petulantly mumbling that we were the ones that were preventing them from closing up and enjoying the holidays. While this consistency might seem commendable, it is not sustainable.

Back then, I was working out 6 times a week- and that was because the gym was closed on Sundays. In those rare weeks when I only worked out four or five times, it felt like a personal loss. 2019 saw things getting hectic for me career-wise. Besides the odd contract job, I was working as a content writer at Opera News Hub and a ghostwriter for a company and a lady I met through a friend, teaching basic science to junior secondary students as part of my National Youth Service Program, preparing for two levels of Spanish exams, preparing for TOEFL and GRE and handling my domestic responsibilities too.

It. Was. Draining.

My life didn’t feel like mine. It felt like all these things had a monopoly on my time and I didn’t. I remember always staggering bleary-eyed and slack-muscled to the gym, fagged out from the weight of my day. Working out was a bit like caffeine for me. That 90–120 minutes always zhuzhed up the latter part of my day. It was the only place I ever felt truly in control. The grueling reps and sets fired up my spirit. The sweat, the straining muscles, the bittersweet feeling of gym sores, the clangs of weight dropped triumphantly, victory horns at the completion of the last set.

It hit me one day that I was working out as much as a fitfluencer/bodybuilder, which wasn’t right. Aside from work, I didn’t write (my personal projects) as much as I worked out. I didn’t even have time to socialize and have meaningful conversations with the people in my life because I was always too busy or too exhausted. I also wasn’t giving my body enough time to recover, as I wasn’t even sleeping or resting well.

I started working on these things. It’s cute to kid yourself and think you are that superhuman who can work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, write 1000 words daily, read 100 pages of a book a day, have a social life, install micro braids on yourself, cook a hearty meal from scratch, work out on weekdays and do yoga on the weekend, all within the 24 hours we all have but you can’t. Even Superman had days off, abeg. On those days, he was just CK.

I am learning to let people do things for me. Outsourcing and admitting to feeling overwhelmed is not failure. It takes a lot to ask for help. I am not less of a person/woman because I decided to eat out today as opposed to cooking. Neither am I less of a person/woman for paying someone to do my hair. I can have hobbies I don’t take seriously and it is not a bad thing. Yes, I am a multipotentialite, but I don’t have to hone or monetize all the skills I have (at the same time). It is a-okay to fight some battles today and others later.

I know this might seem antithetical when compared with the previous post where I reiterate that ‘struggles maketh man’ but not all struggles are formative. Some, especially those self-inflicted ones, are destructive. Soft life fit all of us. You are not lazy for taking things easy. Some days, the only battles I win are doing stretches, writing a few lines, and just breathing deeply — and that’s not a bad thing. Tomorrow, we ride again. E jiro afufu aña isi. Cheers to the soft life!

If you like musings on love, then you’d definitely love With Love From Jikwoyi and Love, The Game of Sore Losers

Or maybe check out my previous post, I Wish You A Hard Life

Or my movie review on the gray areas of race by reading Things Are Never Black or White: Review of I Passed for White (1960)

Thinking of applying to graduate school before the year runs out? Check out 13 Rules for Writing the Perfect Personal Statement.