Accommodate Yourself
I read a post on social media recently that talked about doing things to make your life easier, and I want to talk about that for a bit. It’s fine to accommodate yourself, in all the ways that you can. I think sometimes we think that being an adult means we have to do things a certain way because that’s the way other adults in our lives have done them. Or that accommodations are only for people with disabilities. (Don’t get me wrong, these accommodations are necessary and extremely important.) But being your own person means that you can make your own rules for life, and that you don’t have to leave solely to please others.
Here’s what I mean:
If you don’t have the capacity to go out on Saturday and Sunday, there’s no reason why you can’t stay home one or both days. Being out and miserable is likely feels worse than missing out on good times.
There’s no rule that says you have to clean your home every Saturday morning because that’s what your family did when you were growing up. Maybe what works best for you is cleaning for thirty minutes in the morning each weekday so that your weekends are entirely your own. Or maybe it’s paying someone else to do it.
Maybe you realize that you function better as an entrepreneur if you work from 4pm to midnight, because waking up at 5am makes you angry at the world and entirely unproductive. Or you break up your works into two blocks of time instead of one long one.
Or, you realize that you need twenty minutes of alone time as soon as you get home from work, so you talk it out with your partner and children to make sure that that can happen. It could be an explicit need that you state to your loved ones, or a practice that you institute and allow them to adjust to. (They might not even notice!)
I think the thing that we often miss is cultivating awareness of our own needs when they differ from what we consider to be “normal.” Additionally, sometimes we need to tell people what we need, because they don’t know if we don’t say.
The truth is, the best version of you can come about in different ways from what society appears to promote. Normal is a range, not a specific person, which means that you have to figure out what your own baseline is for being the best version of yourself.
