It's Not Enough; It's Never Enough

So often, I look at the clock or the calendar and realize that the minutes, hours, days are slipping by, yet I never seem to accomplish enough. I am overwhelmed. Here it is, Sunday night, and I look at my list of things to do over the weekend--laundry, grocery shopping, read this, write that. And of my list of 15 items, I have completed maybe 2. And I hate that feeling, the panic that arises when I realize that there's so much I should have done but somehow didn't manage to do. And I know, I try to remind myself, that maybe my expectations are unrealistic, that maybe it's healthier to simply sit on the couch and read on Saturday morning. (And let's face it, all I want to do on a Saturday morning is to read a book, bake muffins, take a bath, and watch a movie.) But here I am, with so much to do, not enough time in which to do it. No matter what I do--simply make dinner, or grade a set of essays, or even finish my dissertation--it never feels like enough; there's always more, always the thing that I didn't get done. I think that probably the real underlying problem here is perfectionism. And to be honest, I expect more of myself than I do of most other people. I want to move beyond that. I want to feel satisfaction in what I have accomplished instead of focusing on all that I haven't. I could probably list, just off the top of my head, 35 things I've failed at, most of them relatively unimportant, some of them important. Yet, I'd be hard pressed to list 10 that I've been successful at. And what really gets to me sometimes is that I know there are people out there--my friends from grad school who don't have jobs yet--who look at me and think how "lucky," how successful I am. And sometimes I wish I could see that, instead of seeing all that I haven't done: laundry, grocery shopping. No matter what I do, it's not enough; it's never enough.