It’s Time To Draw A Line

It’s kind of crazy, right? We’re killing ourselves. Busy, busy, busy all the time. Something’s gotta give. This week I have been feeling so overwhelmed and wondering who came up with the 9-5 five day a week work week. Or who decided that kids would spend all day in school and three more hours after that finishing homework.

I cannot take it anymore. Are you with me?

This year I am making it my mission to slow me and my family down. I am learning to say “No.” period. No with a period. That’s it. No need to try to explain. Just “No”. Period.

I am putting away my phone for hours, sometimes days at a time. It’s too much. Phone calls and emails and DM’s. We were not built to accommodate literally being on call 24 hours a day all day every day.

Make your list of things that you are just no longer willing to do. Talk about it with the little ones in your life and help them by modeling all the ways you are going to be present and step off of this wheel once and for all.

Even small changes add up. You don’t have to do it all at once. Tonight, just try to put your phone in a basket by the door as soon as you come in for the night. Don’t take it out again until the next morning.

If that cannot work for you, ask your office about going to a four day work week. Or tell people that you do not answer social media messages. People either text or email me and this cuts way down on how many people contact me, as well as my stress about any messages I might have missed.

We were not built to be this busy all the time. Write to me and let me know some of the tricks you have used or will use after reading this article to get some of your time, your life, and your sanity back. I will compile them all and send a list out to remind us all that we can do this. It’s time. Be proactive, listen to your heart, and draw a line or you will look up one day and wish you had a long time ago.


About Deedee Cummings

Deedee Cummings is a professional dreamer. She is also an author, therapist, attorney, and mom from Louisville, Kentucky. Cummings founded Make A Way Media in 2014 after struggling to find books with characters who looked like her own children and an extreme lack of stories that reflected their life experiences. Books published by Make A Way focus on hope, diversity, social justice, and therapeutic skills for children and adults. Her work has been featured in HuffPost, Forbes, NPR, USA Today, Essence Magazine, Psych Central, Well+Good, and The EveryGirl, among other media outlets. In 2021, she was appointed to the Kentucky Early Childhood Advisory Council by Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and reappointed to a second term in 2025 acknowledging her decades long service to the children and families of Kentucky. Deedee is also the founder of The Louisville Book Festival. She was inspired to work to highlight and celebrate a culture of reading in her community after working as an in-home therapist and visiting homes of children who had no books. Cummings believes literacy is a fundamental human right. Her work highlights inspiring messages that remind us all it is never too late to begin again.
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