Scheduling and Doing What You Love

This quote really resonates with me at the moment. I haven't been as active as I would like to be in the writing community recently. For those of you who follow me in social media, besides occasionally replying to a post or tweet, I may have been non-existent.
As you may have guessed life gets in the way. This is where the third line in the above quote is important. 'If you stop [writing] start again'. No matter what it is, if you love doing something, you will always come back to it.
That's all well and good though, but what happens when you never seem to be able to come back to what you love to do? What if every day you seem to have less time and it's all you can do to grab something to eat on the go and find time to sleep with everything else that you have to do?
Well, I've been there, and it took many years before I worked out how to get the time to write again.
I was in high school, just starting year 7. My parents both had drilled into me that school was the most important thing for anyone (I might add that I don't fully agree, but that's another story). As a result, I focused all my free time on further study. Every few weekends I might arrange a few hours t see a friend, but not very often. Devoting so much time to school I barely had time for anything else, but when I did take a break from studying, I wrote. However, year seven is still very early on in high school, and I'm sure anyone who has completed it would agree that each year the workload just gets bigger.
By year 8 I had left writing on the backbench, wishing and hoping that I'll find just a moment of time to write one word of my own thing. I ploughed through all my work as fast and efficiently as I knew how, but still, I found no spare time. In year nine though I finally found help. I can't remember exactly how or why I found it. I don't even know where it is anymore, but if I did I'd certainly link it here. It was the blog of anther girl in school just a bit younger than me. She also wanted to write and she had mastered something that on occasion still eludes me. She had a schedule. Don't tell me it's silly. I don't mean the do this first, then this, then this. Instead, it was broad umbrella terms for blocks of time and days of the week. She was homeschooled and from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, she would focus only on schoolwork. Before nine she would write, and on Saturday she would devote the whole day to writing.
For the rest of my schooling, I did my best to follow a similar pattern and it worked...until senior years. Three days in, looking at my world, I decided as much as loved writing, I  couldn't do it, except maybe during the holidays between years eleven and twelve. And it wasn't just my writing that suffered, my social life was non-existent, I only ate when specifically told, and slept usually at my desk, with the lights in my room still on, over my work.
To me, the end of year twelve seemed like all my problems were over. Surely I'd have more time now and be able to write. Well, my health went up and I was eating again, but no spare time. Never!
I'm not sure what it's like in the rest of the world, but shortly after I finished school I went to Centrelink to apply for Youth Allowance. Basically, it means you get money when you don't have a job if you can prove you are looking for work, and often doing volunteer work as well. I had to do twenty job searches a month, and when I started studying part-time, fifteen. It doesn't sound like much, but I in a rural, mostly retiree, area. This means it's a long way to get anywhere, and most people who live here came here to retire, or are retiring, so besides a supermarket, there's barely going to be a thing around. This meant I would spend my whole day from half-past eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, scrolling through multiple sites looking for jobs that I qualified for to apply to. My success rate averaged at one a day. As for the success rate of getting a job, nothing (although this was probably due to my lack of experience seeing as I only had one job during high school).
After two years of no success, I was ready to give up. what was the point of it all? My life had no purpose, but it's life. You can't just give up. I needed to find my purpose, and that's when I remembered my writing, and my story about Karcess that I had started back in year 9 (yes, that is when I got the idea). I felt that I was a shell of a person, but I pushed these feelings aside, I closed the computer, dug out the book that had a few paragraphs scribbled in ten that I'd managed between school, other novels I'd scrapped, and short stories, picked up a pen, and started again.
The effect was amazing and instantaneous! I felt life flow back into me. I felt a smile growing on a face that I thought had forgotten how. My heart was singing. My brain was finally calm. All the stress inside me just melted away. When I put the pen down I was at an all-time high wanting to sing, run, dance, hug strangers on the street! I'm not joking about how I felt. This isn't an exaggeration either. If anything, it's an understatement. At that moment I knew, I could never stop writing again, and no matter what's happened, if I'm writing, everything else seems to take no time at all.
But, life did get in the way. That's because things change. I needed a new schedule, so below, here is my week.
If it's a day I need to clean I get up and do that. Shopping (for food) or something organised with friends or my fiancé takes precedence. I wake up around eight have a shower and get dressed, take the dog for a short walk, about fifteen minutes long. Then I spend time with my family or read until ten. I start the housework that needs doing such as making the bed, washing, clipping and bathing the dog until four, and take a short break at twelve for lunch and another brief walk. Usually, I'll finish before four, at which time I do something toward finding a job such as ringing or emailing somewhere I'd like to work. Then I'll write for a bit until four. Afterwards, I do my exercise, have a shower, do homework for any courses I'm doing or self-directed study, and some leisure activities.
Sunday is slightly different. I work on my blog first. Then I do housework. I also don't do job searches that day but get straight into writing.
I could never stop doing what I love, and what I love is writing.