Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) is a Congresswoman we can be proud of. Her no nonsense attitude is a refreshing change from the worst iteration of realpolitik spewing from the current administration. In particular, she has become famous for politely, but firmly, asserting her authority when challenged by men.

“Reclaiming my time” has gone viral and there are countless memes that apply this phrase to the dating world specifically. But the implications are much wider.

On S2E2 of Issa Rae’s “Insecure”, the protagonist’s best friend Molly is shown in therapy. After some discussion of her work and personal life, the therapist respond: “You frame a lot of things in your life with ‘should’. . .If those ’shoulds’ didn’t come to fruition, would you feel comfortable with your life looking a different way?” This is a question that I think every adult has struggled with in some degree since the beginning of time. But it’s particularly salient to millenials, who have grown up with so much choice, so many promises, and such high expectations that the reality of adult obligations has proved an especially rude, and sometimes bitter, shock.

Many of us follow the same routine day in and day out. I would argue that most of us just float through it, pulled and pushed this way and that, simply reacting to whatever happens. We waste hours on things we mostly won’t care about even a year from now–television, Buzzfeed listicles, InstaTwitBook, online window shopping, cute animal videos, etc etc. I’m guilty of all of the above (plus Pinterest recipe clipping, blog reading, and video recaps of my favorite shows). I’ve ended many a day feeling exhausted, but having not accomplished much of any real substance. Adding to my current confusion is the fact that a year ago I blew up my life by quitting my job and going back to school. Currently, I’m underemployed and my contract job hasn’t required any tax work so far. I have an interview coming up at the end of this week that I’m really excited about, but trying not to pin my hopes on. At this point, I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs, dozens of which I’ve been super excited about, only to be ignored, rejected, or get to the interview and find out it’s basically an indentured servant position.

Anyway, I’m on a particularly brutal document review project. The discovery is for a corporate merger which makes the documents more technical and mentally demanding to work through than your average production. I’m putting in about 50 hours a week and the client asked everyone to do at least 10 hours, 7 days a week to meet the deadline and I just flatly refused. I’m reclaiming my time! The whole reason I do document review is that I can pick and choose my projects and my hours, and that wasn’t the requirement when I signed up so I don’t feel obligated to break my neck because the client miscalculated. I clocked out Friday and happily didn’t clock in again until Monday.

So what did I do with my reclaimed time? This brings me back around to my second point. When I was a little, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a lot of things but I always came back around to that. I wanted to write fiction, but I thought journalism would have been a good compromise. Then I got to high school and started researching careers and realized that a) journalism jobs were very hard to come by and only getting hard due to the rise of the internet; b) I’d very likely make a crap salary for the first 10 years; and c) unless I wanted to get stuck on local news I’d have to move to New York City. And at the time I decided I just didn’t want it bad enough. I grew up in a cash strapped household, I wanted to be comfortable, and I wanted to live somewhere with little to no snow in winter and a reasonable cost of living.

But lately I’ve just felt like something was missing in my life. Last year I downloaded a novel writing software called yWriter, and began working on random scenes and concepts. Last, something finally clicked. On Friday night I stayed up until 4 am and wrote about a chapter’s worth of material. Sicne then I’ve been scribbling down story arcs, character names, and background info for a fantasy novel. It might be complete crap. It may never be read by anyone but my sister, but I want to write it anyway. I didn’t have the gumption to be a full time artist, but I have a brain and a working laptop. There’s no reason I can’t still write for myself, and I know if I give it up completely then I’ll look back on my life one day and completely regret it. And if I have a kid who decides to be a writer and becomes a raging success, I don’t want to feel resentful that they lived my dream because I just let it fall by the wayside. And who knows, if it turns out half decent maybe I’ll self-publish it on Amazon and you’ll see an affiliate link here on the blog 🙂

So how are you reclaiming your time? Let me know in the comments!