Vacillating

I vacillate, meaning I love extremes. I like to relax and sleep 12 hours a night and stay in my apartment on a cold, San Francisco foggy day, or I like to nanny for 9 hours, probe my heart further, plan dinner for 12, and arrive home 15 hours later.
I don't know where the gray is in this picture: how I can compromise and have a life of intensity and one of taking time for myself while still serving others. My head is pounding from the moments of today: fleeting gems of community, searching for a kite that catapulted down a mountain, playing red light/green light in French, talking to my friend Matt on the phone who I hadn't talked to in 2 months. Having my friends tell me that they are blessed from me, the Africans that they miss my happiness.
I don't want the inner reserves to run dry, for me to search for where the happiness went after I've given it all away. I don't want to try and make people like me that aren't good for me. I want to firmly set boundaries, but still allow myself grace to fail and make mistakes. Life isn't a series of "shoulds," rather a series of choosing how I will feel when things happen. I can be sad, I can be mad, I can be upset. Showing my emotion is letting people know how I feel, which is something I don't like to let on. Maybe it comes from the Washington and Lee speaking tradition that became engrained in my head after four years spent pretending that everything was going just fine!, when passing a fellow student on the colonnade.
It's the reason that sometimes I laugh when I should be sad, when the tears come unpredictably and at the most inconvenient of times.