Life post-DCP: learning to breathe

It’s been almost two months since I got home from America, where I spent 9 weeks working at Walt Disney World and two weeks travelling the west coast. Throughout that time, I lived off 6 hours sleep a night, boxed pasta and jar sauce, $150 a week to spend as I pleased, an excessive supply of sugar and potentially too many grilled cheese sandwiches from Toy Story Land.

I would wake up around 7, spend a couple hours editing vlogs or writing content, get ready for the parks, spend all day running around with my friends, and then work until midnight, showering and crashing into bed around 1am. I was walking an average of eight miles a day and, to put it bluntly, only my sheer love for the company kept me from having a breakdown (not to say that I didn’t have a couple mini ones, including one I can’t explain at Universal merely standing in line for The Mummy, and another prompted by a rainstorm destroying my phone...a story for another time!)

At this point you’re probably wondering what this blog post is all about, but I’m basically putting it up to say that I’m going to take some time to breathe. I got home from my program at the start of September and had two weeks to catch up with everyone I hadn’t seen all summer (meaning I was out almost everyday recounting the same stories) before launching into an internship in London where I will work until Christmas, doing the standard 9am-5:30pm workday with a 90 minute commute both ways.

I was sitting on my lunch break by Tower Bridge today, attempting to squeeze plans with a friend into an already overpacked diary (I now don’t have a free weekend until after Christmas) and fretting about what blog I would write this week to maintain my long-time, uninterrupted streak when I realised – that maybe it’s time to take a break.

It’s been over a year now of putting posts up every Thursday, sharing my love of Disney in every form. My passion has not changed at all, and if anything it’s grown stronger, but I am feeling just a tad burnt out right now with everything going on.

I’m someone who always puts pressure on herself to go above and beyond expectations, and I never settle for a sub-par job. However that’s what I feel I’ve been doing these past few weeks, writing something for the sake of a streak, which seems about as pointless as the kind you have on Snapchat.

I started this blog to get myself excited to work for the company, to share my experiences with others, and to get myself writing and improving through practice. This was also in preparation for a career in the creative field. I now write everyday for a living, and sometimes the last thing I want to do when I clock out from that job is somehow squeeze a further few hundred words out of my brain.

So this post is both an apology for some of the less inspiring content I’ve put up, but also a notice of temporary leave – not that many people even read this or would notice if my posts took a pause. However for anyone scrolling through this who feels a connect with what I’m saying, mainly to do with taking on too much and feeling obligated to do it all, let this be a sign that this does not have to be so.

I’m no longer a university student who can structure her own days as she pleases, going for a gym session mid-morning and cake at two in the afternoon, so I now need to let my evenings (when I’m not busy with friends, family, or going for runs – which is another new thing I’ve stupidly decided to take on) be evenings again, where I slob about and eat food and don’t have to do anything else.

Any obligation I have to post is purely put on me by myself, and while this time next week I might suddenly feel re-inspired to write again, for now I feel like it’s a good idea to take a break, step back, and to breathe.

No matter what you’re doing post-DCP, I can guarantee it was crazy for you and that this is something you probably need as well. So let’s stick on Tangled, drink tea from our overpriced souvenir mugs, and just be for a little while.

See ya real soon (probably),

Emily