I don’t. I counterweight them, like a dangerously lopsided seesaw where one side is a flaming typewriter and the other is a pile of laundry silently judging me.
“Balance” implies symmetry, serenity—a tidy 50/50 split like some suburban custody agreement between Professional You and Personal You. But real life isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a three-ring circus running on black coffee, impulse control, and guilt management.
Here’s the honest truth:
Work bleeds. It seeps into the crevices of your off hours like mold in an old basement. Especially when your work is your calling—or your compulsion. As a writer, everything feels like work. A dinner conversation becomes dialogue. A nightmare becomes a subplot. A walk in the woods turns into a meditation on entropy, loneliness, and the collapse of Western civilization. (And people wonder why writers drink).
Home, meanwhile, demands presence. Not just physical, but psychological. You can’t phone it in with people who know your tells. You have to show up for the dishes, the arguments, the bedtime stories, the inconveniently timed existential crises of loved ones who never asked to live with an emotionally exhausted philosopher.
So instead of balance, I aim for dynamic equilibrium—like a tightrope walker in a wind tunnel. Sometimes I lean hard into work, vanish for a week, and emerge pale and malnourished holding the rough draft of something unpublishable. Other times, I shut it all down, cook a stew, and remember that hugging your partner with both arms is not only allowed but encouraged.
A few things that help me not go completely feral:
- Boundaries that aren’t lies. If I say I’m off the grid, I stay off. No peeking at the inbox like a pervert in a bush.
- Scheduled chaos. I block off time for writing, thinking, and collapse. If I know the madness has a container, I’m less likely to implode on a Tuesday.
- Rituals. Lighting a candle before I write. Going outside after I stop. Ritual is the punctuation that separates “work Geox” from “partner-who-remembers-to-make-eye-contact Geox.”
- Letting go of perfection. The house will be messy. The email will go unanswered. The book will be late. So be it. If the apocalypse is coming, I’d rather arrive flawed but conscious.
Ultimately, there’s no clean separation between work and life. They’re the same river, just different currents. I try not to drown in either. I paddle. I drift. I curse the weather. I write it all down. Then I go do the dishes, because entropy doesn’t take breaks.