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This week has been hard, and its only Tuesday. The levels of stress I’m feeling are sky high, which is stupid really, because its me setting crazy deadlines that’s got me here.

• A’s parents come to stay on Friday so the house needs to be tidy and the spare bedroom (my yarn-haven) needs to be habitable.
• Its free pattern on Friday and I haven’t designed the pattern yet (although have a good idea what it’ll be)
• I want to finish two sweaters.
• I want to start another five sweaters.
• I want to make a hat.
• I want to knit my first pair of socks.
• I need to make the March panel of the Greenwich Mystery CAL – and photograph it and write it up!

The thing is, all these things are made up by my own brain. Its running at 100 miles per hour and my hands can’t keep up… and neither can my motivation.

I feel so swamped by expectations I put on myself that I can’t breathe. Writing them down helps, for sure, but I’m almost scared that my memory will forget all these ideas I have – and I’m not skilled enough to draw them out.

But why do I put these expectations on myself? Who am I trying to impress? When did crochet start to become so overwhelming, when it was something that originally bought me so much calm among the chaos?

In a way, I blame social media. Our lives are constantly on display for everyone to see, and sometimes it has to be picture-perfect. You try and run a business and get exposure anywhere you can, to find that because you haven’t posted in 3 days, you’ve lost followers.

Its a minefield. A cataclysmic cycle of wanting to be deemed good enough, and achieving it. But by who’s standards?

My own standards are a manifestation of my mental health pushing me. It can be productive, sure; but it can also be extremely debilitating and tiresome. I’ve always believed that you weren’t put on this earth to be good at one thing, but to learn as many things as you can. The problem with that mindset is that I’m always conscious of time and how it flies by.

I can’t tell you how angry I am over myself that I didn’t cherish our three months travelling round Australia and New Zealand more. But my logical brain will ask “How could I have cherished it more?” I swam in the lakes, jumped in the seas, experienced the culture, and yet it flew by so quickly and I long to have that feeling of freedom back.

Time is a blessing that I am hyper-aware of. Its the biggest pressure I face – never having enough time. But the exhaustion of that pressure manifests itself in procrastination, and thus I live my life in a Catch-22. A vicious cycle.

I need to clean the house, but it seems so overwhelming right now, and the builders have made a mess so big that I don’t know where to start. A isn’t here so I’m left alone trying to face this mountain of tasks, and fight a battle against my own brain to tell it to slow down. Just, slow, down. There is time.