Daring Monday: Reassess

What are your warning signals? How do you know when you are pushing the boundaries of your physical/spiritual/mental health? Do you know them? Did you even realize you have them? I’ve met some people so far beyond internal exhaustion, and so disconnected from themselves (not as unusual as you might think) that they have no idea how to tell when something is starting to go wrong within themselves. I’m not one of those people.

If I want to stay on top of depression, if I want to be the one who chooses my life, then I need to know what to watch for.

All About Me

I find that I’m a strange person. I love people and being out and about, but I absolutely need my own space and privacy – I need to feel absolutely alone every now and then. I hate having nothing to do and get a high off having a project and work, but working too hard pushes me to a brink of exhaustion. The lines between these internal yins and yangs in my personality are fine and sometimes hazy. It’s often super simple for me to step from excited and fabulous to Way Too Much without even noticing it.

Take June for example. I was so excited to be teaching my tarot class for the first time. My class was full (with a waiting list even), all the students were engaged and engaging and it was great to feel useful again. But it took its toll.

I had to break my own rules just to keep up (this is the price of procrastination) I worked weekends and evenings just to get the stuff ready for each class. Not to mention all the other things I had signed up for that were now floundering on back burners. In my excitement I didn’t realize just how tiring the month had been. Then, of course, I went and had my tooth extracted the same week as the final class.

Talk About No Time to Breath

Following the flow and my internal guidance I got my About and Hire me page up, and I officially started doing tarot readings and parties. I just kind of catapulted from one place to another, which, don’t get me wrong, is really good and I love it but…

Even good, and exactly on your path, change can be scary and overwhelming. Especially if you were feeling drained and sick before it all started. But that is something you don’t always remember to look at in the moment, and after all, isn’t this what you asked for? Aren’t these all good things?

Wakizashi even said to me this weekend, “I don’t know what your problem is, your life is great. Life is good. What is there to be upset about?”

And my life is good. And I am so excited about the things I’m doing and the people I’m meeting. I finish a tarot appointment and I feel high, almost Ike work just shouldn’t be so joyful.

But…

I also need to admit that something is wrong. I’ve been eating terribly (hardly eating at all till night time). The boys have both complained about unwarranted anger and grumpiness two days running. I’m staying up till all hours of the night, sleeping in, and still feeling exhausted. My right eye keeps twitching. I feel like my life is slightly out of control, I can’t decide what I should be doing with my time, and if I start to think about it too much I get a strange internal frantic feeling. Most telling of all, I can feel myself trying to escape; blocking out the real world with books, and movies, and daydreams.

All these things tell me I’m suffering from a little bit more than overwork. If I don’t take this sudden gift of clear vision and do something about it now I will very soon find myself looking up from a deep, dark, internal pit. Hidden in the description above are about a half dozen of my warning signs.

Stepping Back

Life changes. That (not taxes and death – though technically it’s intimately related to death) is the one constant you can expect from life: change.

Life is a river that constantly rushes and pushes us through time and experience, and like any other river this one is never the same twice. Sometimes you can spend years waiting, fighting and pushing for something, anything, to change. Other times it can feel like life is rushing past so fast you can hardly get your feet under you or even catch your breath. We move from lazy river to rushing rapids and back again.

That’s why it’s so important, when you feel like you might be losing your grip on your very self, that we have a habit of stepping back, of taking time to reassess. Am I doing everything I can to keep myself healthy? Am I listening to my body? To my soul? Is the problem that I’ve gone off course somewhere? Or is it simply that I’m not taking enough care of myself?

As a big picture thinker I have a hard time both remembering to reassess my life, and to keep my eye on the details that help me keep my feet under me at all times. This is why I create routines and systems; they are the guidelines and boundaries that help keep me healthy and prevent me from diving in over my head – most of the time.

June was so overwhelming that I abandoned those systems; a decision that landed me right here on the brink of “not healthy”. So, this week I desperately needed to take the time to reassess them. It’s time, now that my work is evolving and growing, for me to change my daily schedule and to reframe my work week.

For example, tarot parties naturally happen on weekends, and I have something booked the next three to four weekends. Which means what I define as a “weekend” (ie two days where I don’t do work) needs to be reassessed. (I’ve decided to only book appointments on one day of each weekend and then to take Mondays off. Daring Monday will still post on Monday, but I’m going to write it on Fridays.).

I’m trying to firm up how I use my time each day and use tools, like my iPhone calendar, to help me follow the schedule. I’m reassessing my priorities and current projects, and am asking how I can help myself get the things that matter most to me done without pushing too hard.

I’ve negotiated a personal retreat with Wakizashi (I normally need one once a year to hold my sanity) and I’m thinking I need to plan lots of space throughout the summer.

It’s often very difficult to step back and look at all of this objectively. It sucks to have to admit that I’ve gotten myself into this position myself. But there’s nothing as empowering as being able to sift through all of this and make new decisions, to set new boundaries for myself. It feels like I’m getting some control back; the water may not be smoothing out, but I’ve definitely got a bit of my footing back. The rest of the challenge is going to be in following through on my decisions to make sure I don’t get swept away again.

Over To You
Of course, your issues and best solutions and my issues and best solutions won’t be the same thing. And maybe you don’t particularly need a reassessment in the same way I do, but hey, it’s summer – half-way through the year – it definitely can’t hurt. If you are a big picture person (like me) then you need to move in and look at the details of your life (like I did above) and if you are a detail person then maybe you need to step back and make sure you haven’t veered too far off course.

Now’s as good a time as any to assess how things are going and to make some course corrections (as needed), why not join me this week?