Day: May 2, 2016

Several of my sociology students did their year-end presentation on the concept of role conflict and how it applies to their lives. The term is defined as “emotional conflict arising when competing demands are made on an individual in the fulfillment of his or her multiple social roles.” Watching them talk and the resulting discussions made me rethink my own role conflicts. I’m a writer, a boyfriend, a father, a teacher, and a coach. These things occupy the majority of my time and headspace, often overlapping and creating immense conflict. 

For example, I always have conflicts between work and parenting, because I want to come home and spend time with loved ones but I still have work to do. I still have writing that needs to get handled. Then I need to leave home not even two hours after the key hits the door in order to go be a coach. I’m not even going to get into how this has made my boyfriend role suffer (only got 10 min, folks).

For me the conflict centers around time and mental energy. Each role places significant demands on me and I am having to decide on a daily basis which role is going to be the so-called primary role for that day and receive the most attention. I’m certain this is what everyone goes through and I am just applying fancy terms to the age-old process of juggling responsibilities. Still, the terms help me to rationalize and quantify exactly how much is expected of me on a daily basis.

It is a lot.

Sometimes things get neglected and I sacrifice being effective at one role to really just maintain others. Luckily, I’m a professor, which means that I can enjoy two months of reduced labor in one role, giving me the time and energy to focus on others.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m still here. Didn’t quit the writing life. Never could if I tried.
2. There are things I do in life that are utterly frivolous and meaningless and quite probably a waste of my time. Facebook is, of course, one of those things. It is largely useless and inane, I still use it, and thats okay. My bestie recently asked my why I still look at posts and I really didn’t have a good answer. I decided this morning that I don’t need a ‘good answer’. Everyone has something that they do that is really useless and offers no gain from an outsiders perspective. This is relative as their ‘gain’ and your ‘gain’ might be very different. In other words, taking a moment to scroll through a handful of silly posts on facebook makes me happy for some reason and, since it doesn’t hurt anyone, I shouldn’t have to justify it. Like I said, we all have something like that. Some people have the Kardashians. I’ll try to be better about judging that too.
3.  Still having issues uploading from wordpress…

I must admit there are days where being a writer is the furthest thing from my mind and remembering to put words together is nearly impossible to do. When that happens writing can seem like an inconvenience. Who wants to to drop everything and spend ten minutes posting to a daily blog. It seems silly–meaningless even. I feel like that more than I want to admit. I don’t always want to string together words and continue this habit. And then when I do I think about the counter–2275 could easily be the last one and then I can finally exhale, skip one, and start over at one.

What would it matter?

I don’t think it would matter to anyone but me, and for me it would be a small yet powerful admittance of failure. It would reflect the moment I gave up and let the ideas of writing slide down the scale of importance to a place where it honestly could never come back from. Writing is something I love and take great pride in, but it is also the most difficult and often fruitless pursuit in my life. Like I wrote above, it wouldn’t matter to anyone to me that I quit and I could do so without anyone being the wiser.

But then I would know. I would remember every day that I laid down and gave up and then I wouldn’t have any credibility with myself. I wouldn’t feel like I had to keep going with anything I ever did when it came to writing. Clearly this wasn’t why I started the blog, but over time this is what it became. An outlet, a promise, and a daily rededication to the cause I hold most dear.