I’ve written a few posts about knowing your limits, and balance, so I felt like in the interests of full disclosure, I needed to write this one, too. This is the flip side of those seemingly wise posts… it’s what happens when you are trying to find balance, but aren’t always successful.

These past few months have gone by so quickly for me, but mostly because I’ve been so busy. The class I’m taking this semester is really interesting, but it’s also a lot of reading and work. Launching Accessible YOUniverse and trying to get a few events lined up to participate in have taken up any spare time I can find. And as we get closer and closer to July, I feel the countdown clock ticking until the end of my time as Ms. Wheelchair USA. I don’t want to waste any of this time, or this opportunity, so I’ve really been saying yes to as much as I possibly can. And sometimes, I say yes to too much. It results in me writing posts (like this one) at 10:30 on a Saturday night. Or, it can mean I have to skip the Andrew McMahon concert I was really looking forward to, because after I made my to-do list for the weekend I realized there just weren’t enough hours in the next two days to do it all!

I am still learning. I’m figuring out how to make time for everything that I’m interested in doing, and how to be okay with saying no to things I want to do but might not have time for. It’s easy to say no to something you’re not really interested in, but it’s a lot harder to say no when it’s an opportunity you feel like you might miss forever by turning it down.

At an event about civic engagement hosted by Pitt that I went to last week, the keynote speaker talked about the power of detours. I was hearing this only a few days after the missed concert, so it was especially poignant. Just as I’m still learning about balancing, I’m also still learning that sometimes, things going ways you didn’t expect can actually be good. Something that seems like a missed opportunity now can actually just be a detour to something that’s even better for you later on. And when I think back to my life a year ago, I definitely would never imaged that I’d be where I am now. There were definitely some detours involved, well off the beaten path, that got me to where I am today.

Especially with social media now, it’s so easy for it to seem like everyone has everything figured out. Maybe it even seems like I have it all figured out! But I promise you, I don’t, and I don’t really think everyone else does, either. We’re all learning as we go, and course correcting on our way there. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail – but as long as we’re learning from our experiences, we’re still moving ahead.