Letting go

Last Friday morning, I woke up with a terribly itchy rash on my face. Probably too much information, but we're talking unattractive small, red bumps and a non-stop desire to scratch my face off - pretty much a girl's worst nightmare. Three days later, I'm in the dermatologist's office being told I'm having some kind of allergic reaction with a cause that's hard to pinpoint. Just the news I wanted to hear.

A good friend said it might be stress-related. I didn't believe her at first, because I'm pretty much always stressed out - until today, when I returned to work and the itching only got worse. Just three hours into my day, my list of flagged e-mails was long enough to scroll for days, my to-do list ever-growing and my face once again hot and itchy. Stress-triggered? Maybe not. But it surely wasn't helping.

So before I started feeling bad for myself (like I know we as human beings have a bit of a tendency to do), I realized that the fact that I was letting my work get to me that much truly wasn't healthy. While I love and take much pride in my career, I need to take a step back and realize that it cannot be my life. I need to let go.

"You can be who you choose to be. Whether you do or whether you don't depends on your priorities." 

So I think: who do I want to be? And what do I value in my life? I surely don't want to be someone who lets the worries and woes of my job carry over into my personal time. We give at least eight hours per day, five days per week to our jobs - don't we deserve the rest of that time for us?

Sure, there will always be busy weeks. But there are weeks we need to busy and weeks we need to let our work day end when we leave the office. My new challenge for myself is drawing that line more often.

I can feel the itchiness going away already.

How do you feel about separating your work from your personal life? What could you do in your daily life to help let go?