A Friday Stream of Consciousness
Finally my pile has eased - here's what I REALLY want to write about. What grabs you?
In this piece:
Why things have been bad
How things got better
What my pen did when my brain had room
An unedited list of what I would write about it I was in truth.
Why things have been bad
My Substack posting has suffered recently. I’ve been in a SEASON. You know the kind. The unrelenting, will-this-ever-end, my-life-is-totally-unmanageable, kind of season where the demands on your time and energy well exceed the available capacity.
For the last 3-4 months I’ve been utterly drowning under the weight of things, especially at work, driven mostly by a staff gap, but also by the re-emergence of some of my least useful habits. I’ve been doing everything myself, which was fine for a couple of months, and then drove me into utter meltdown. My back gave out under the stress, and my mental health took a nose-dive.
Mental energy is a funny old thing, isn’t it? It’s a bit like trying to carry too many items at once. You know what I’m talking about.
You forget your re-usable bags at the supermarket, and stack your groceries in a wobbled pile in your arms, striding across the carpark with an orange in your pocket.
You valiantly try to empty the car of bags, sweatshirts, drink bottles and coffee cups in a single trip - and stop to grab the mail on the way.
You juggle a toddler on one hip while precariously balancing your keys, wallet, phone and a soft toy in the other hand.
You burden both arms with bags of varying weights, winding the handles chaotically around your fingers, feeling them dig in and turn into angry red marks across your hands while you lumber ungraciously with the load.
If you've done this, you'll know what happens when someone finally spots your predicament and offers to take something off your hands.
... You can't hand anything over.
The skyscraper of stuff you've arranged is inefficient, jumbled and leaning on each other for support. If you tried to separate a single item, the whole system would fail, and you'd watch it all tumble to the ground.
This is what delegating - or even getting a handle on things - feels like when you're chronically overscheduled, overtasked, and overwhelmed. You know you should, but the mental and physical effort of selecting the appropriate piece, disentangling it from the mess, and handing it over - while making sure the rest of the stuff doesn't come crashing down - is too difficult. So, you soldier on.
Eventually, if you’re like I’ve been the last few months, you get so tired and sore from carrying the whole pile that you lose perspective. You forget you didn't need three of those things in the first place, your workarounds are messy, your stack is unwieldy, and your arms aren't even that strong. You convince yourself that the only option is to carry it ALL, and the only person who can carry it is YOU, JUST LIKE THIS.
If you’re anything like me, on your worst days, you might want to throw the damn pile in the fire and warm your weary hands over the flames while they burn. Until recently, I’ve been dancing with those kind of destructive thoughts.