This morning I felt gloomy and restless, so I swapped my usual coffee-and-book routine for a walk in the forest. It is only a fifteen minute walk from my home to the forest. In the summer, I go there almost every evening, at least for a quick visit while the sun is setting and my kids are using up their daily screen quota on some silly Netflix show. I should probably be a better mother and get them to walk with me, but the truth is, I quite like walking alone and my children are not eager participants of aimless rambles, so in a way it’s a win-win, even if only in short term. In the winter though the days are short and I rarely have one of two hours of daylight to do as I please. So, today was a gift.

Every time I go to the forest, I remind myself that I should change my approach to wellness and mental health. I should schedule work around wellness and mental health, not the other way around. This time I told myself that I would try to plan one mental health day every two months, choose them well in advance and stick to them no matter what. I think I had a similar idea last March, during another walk in the forest. I ended up working in a crazy rush through spring and then from September to December. I ended up sacrificing myself, not just my wellness days, but my sanity and emotional balance for the work I love. This is the pattern I keep repeating over and over. In my twenties, I used to come to the office on the weekends, stay until midnight, take overnight trains to location visits and survive on a mix of RedBull and Ibuprofen. I was ambitious, driven and most of all I was taught that I, an Eastern European woman, had to work ten times harder to compete against mediocre expats from Western Europe and North America. It took me a long while to realize that I never had a chance in that competition, but the pattern of trying harder, doing more, running myself to the ground just to prove that I am good remained.

This year, although I usually hate new year’s resolutions, I will schedule my life around walks in the forest.