I Want More. But Where the Fuck Is It Supposed to Fit?

I’m trying to figure out how to make room for the things I want in a life that’s already pretty fucking full. Making time for yourself sounds simple until work, relationships, family, and everyday life have already claimed most of your week.

For me, that means finding time to write and build something of my own while still being present for my daughter, my marriage, and myself. Your list might look different. But maybe you know the feeling of wanting something badly and wondering where, exactly, it’s supposed to fit.

And by “making room,” I don’t mean buying another planner. Although, obviously, I would love to buy another planner. A fresh notebook and the delusion that I’m about to become an entirely different person? One of my favorite combinations. 😂 And yes, I do have my favorite planner. I just can’t expect it to manufacture childcare and three extra hours.

I mean, looking at a regular week and asking where any of this is actually supposed to happen.

Where does the writing go? When do I work on building something that might eventually make money? What time belongs to my family, what time belongs to me, and why do I keep quietly assigning the same hour to all three?

On paper, I understand that I can’t do everything at once. In practice, I apparently expect myself to be a present mother, a loving wife, a functioning adult, and a woman building an entirely new chapter of her life, all inside a schedule where someone still needs to figure out dinner.

And when it doesn’t work, I’m the one who gets a bad review.

I keep making plans for time that already belongs to something

It’s easy to imagine writing more when I picture an open stretch of time and a brain that’s ready to cooperate. It’s harder when that time comes after a full day of everyone needing something from me.

Technically, there might be an hour available. But I’m in it too, with whatever energy and patience and ability to form a sentence I have left. I can’t keep making plans as though the version of me who shows up at the end of the day has just returned from a restorative solo vacation.

The reality is, she has been running around following a toddler, doing laundry, packing orders, writing, answering questions, and remembering things. She would like to sit down.

And I don’t want every quiet moment to become another opportunity I’m supposed to maximize. I want to build something, but I also want to enjoy my husband. I want to be with my daughter without mentally calculating what I could be getting done. Sometimes I want to do absolutely nothing without turning it into evidence that I don’t want my dreams badly enough. Those things belong in the life I’m trying to build, too.

The part where something has to give

This is where it gets uncomfortable, because I would prefer a solution that requires no trade-offs. Ideally, I become slightly more organized and suddenly have time for meaningful work, a happy family, creative fulfillment, money, rest, and whatever my newest obsession is. Everyone gets what they need. Nothing piles up. Nobody has to adjust.

Beautiful. Where do I sign?

But if writing is going to get a real place in my week, something else may have to move. I may need to ask for protected time instead of hoping a convenient little window opens and nobody needs me during it. I may need to accept that a household task can wait even when I’m the person most bothered by it. I may also need to choose which idea gets my attention right now. That last one is particularly rude.

Because I do want all the things. Choosing one can feel like abandoning the others, even when I know I’m just deciding what I can reasonably work on this week. There’s a difference between keeping an idea for later and trying to keep it alive by giving it eleven distracted minutes every few days. I’m starting to wonder how much of my frustration comes from expecting visible progress on everything simultaneously.

The guilt follows either choice

Shonda Rhimes talked about this in her Dartmouth commencement speech: succeeding in one area of her life often meant failing in another. And fuck, I understand that feeling.

There are days when I let my daughter watch TV all day so I can write my newsletter. Do I feel like an awful mom? ABSOLUTELY. Then there are weeks when I leave the newsletter until the last minute because my daughter, my family, or whatever else was happening needed my attention. And then I feel like I’m dropping the ball on something I keep saying I want to build.

Somehow, whichever thing gets my attention, I end up thinking about the thing that didn’t.

Maybe you know that feeling, even if your life looks completely different from mine. You finally make time for something you want, but spend half of it feeling guilty about what you’re leaving for later. Or you give everyone else what they need and get to the end of the week wondering when you were supposed to have a turn.

I don’t have a magical way to make that guilt disappear. But I’m trying to stop letting it decide whether I did enough that day. Writing the newsletter matters. A day with my daughter matters. Time with my husband matters. And time for myself has to get a place in there somewhere, too, without me having to meet everyone else’s needs first.”

You can care about everything without doing it all today

Some days, the business will get more of me. Other days, my family will. Sometimes I’ll need to put something down because I’m fucking tired. I can care deeply about all of it and still have to choose where my attention goes today.

That might mean things take longer than I hoped. That I have to change the plan, ask for help, or come back to something after a week when it barely got touched. I’m allowed to be frustrated by that. But I also want to give myself some credit for continuing to find a way.

And if you’re doing some version of this, give yourself that credit, too. The thing you’re working toward still counts when you have to build it in pieces. You can take your ambition seriously and make a plan that accounts for the rest of your life.

What would make time for yourself actually possible?

That feels like a more useful question than “Why can’t I get my shit together?”

Pick one thing you keep saying you want time for. What would need to change in your actual week for it to get a turn? For me, it’s writing. What would help me sit down and write before I’m completely depleted? Could we protect some time for it as a family? Maybe I need to ask for that time directly, and stop expecting myself to finish everything else first.

For you, maybe the job that pays your bills also gets every decent hour of your brain. You want to build a business, take a class, or make something just because you enjoy it, but by the time you get home, even deciding what to eat feels like another assignment.

Maybe you’re in a relationship you love, but you’ve gotten so used to spending your free time together that you don’t know how to say, “I want tonight for my own thing,” without feeling like you’re rejecting someone.

Or maybe you technically have the time, which makes you even harder on yourself when you don’t use it. But you’re tired, you don’t know where to start, and the enormous thing you’ve decided you should accomplish keeps making it harder to do anything at all.

Those situations need different kinds of support.

What does support look like in your life?

A free evening won’t help much if you’re too depleted to use it. A detailed plan won’t create an uninterrupted hour. And waiting until nobody wants anything from you could keep you waiting for a very long fucking time.

So get specific. Could you give your project one small block of time on a day when you have more energy? Tell your partner you want an evening to yourself before the week fills up? Choose one part of the idea to work on instead of expecting yourself to launch the whole damn thing?

And if the honest answer is “I don’t have room for this right now,” what can you consciously put on hold so you’re not judging yourself for it every day?

I’m asking myself these questions, too. Some answers require help, money, or flexibility we may not have yet. But knowing what’s missing gives us something more useful to work with than another week of calling ourselves lazy.

We can start with the week we actually have. Choose what matters enough to get some attention, decide what can wait, and see what needs to change to make that choice possible.

Yup, some of these links are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting this little corner of the mess. 💛