Playing Catch Up and Cutting Back
I’m a little behind today. On almost everything. It was a late night with a house full of kids and I know I’m not the only parent who’s playing catch up today. But it doesn’t feel good. Right now it feels like there are too many projects on my desk and too few hours in my day.
The reality is that, in an earlier stage of life, this would have been a normal occurrence for me. But in the last year, I’ve cut back. I’ve forced myself to no longer expect productivity at the cost of my health. I’ve listened to all the instagram posts about self care and prioritizing and delegating. It seems like such common knowledge that at first, you might wonder why it took me so long.
Slowing down was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. To brag a bit, I’ve done some pretty hard things in my time. But nothing like this. Nothing like letting go of the idea that the value of my day was measured in the things I got done. Nothing like learning how to ignore the probably well meaning but ultimately hurtful questions about how I was spending my time. Nothing like learning to accept that I might never be able to operate in the same capacity as I used to.
If you’ve been wondering, the health issues I’ve referred to are somewhat diffuse and also confusing, as so many health problems can be. But suffice it to say two things happened at once: an old neck injury began worsening with stress, which moved what had been a decade of migraines into periodic spells of vertigo. And second, my cortisol levels dropped, a lot, and wouldn’t go up and down the way they were supposed to. At first glance, less stress hormones might seem like a good thing, but cortisol is what helps us respond to situations. And without enough of it, I just didn’t have what it took to rise to whatever occasions I faced. My amazing doctor explained it by basically saying that when you’re in crisis mode for as long as I was, eventually our bodies just…can’t anymore.
For the first time in a long time, I found myself pretty much housebound. I couldn’t drive with the vertigo and the cortisol thing meant I wasn’t up to much more than my regular parenting and household stuff. But the funny part is, I was actually okay with it. I was happier housebound than when I was trying to keep up.
Things are getting better. I did a long, hard course of physical therapy for my neck. I got rid of pretty much all obligations beyond caring for my kids. I did some hard work on reducing pain through all of those annoying mind-body things like meditation. And most of all, I started to unpack the lies that most of us tell ourselves. About how we’re lazy if we don’t do enough, or, worse, about how we’re better than everyone else if we do more. About how what we do decides who we are. Because there were days that the most I was up to was walking from a chair in the living room to a chair in the garden. I couldn’t bend over, I couldn’t stand for very long, and I definitely couldn’t stare at a screen and write.
But you know what I could do? Be there. Call my friends. Listen to my children talk about their days. Think up ideas for new books, books that would be written when things got easier. For as much as I’m trying to play catch up today, life is easier now. And I also know that if I never catch up - if things fall by the wayside - that will be ok too.
