Keeping Track

Not sleeping has an effect on me. Or several/various effects. Ariel wakes up every night frantically crying. This has been true for more than a year.

On the nights when I sleep right next to her, she still wakes up. But she is comforted more easily.

Fiona wakes up all nights as well. Winding down a road of feeling sorry for myself, I stretch my imagination to remember what it was like to lay down at night and not wake up until the sun came up (or an alarm).

Yet, if memory serves me correctly, I had more angst ten years ago about relatively nothing. I wrote so much more (than now) about the many, many, many things that presented as struggles from my perspective.

Burn-out has been defined (in one spot) as, “an imbalance between the psychological resources of an individual and the demands being made on those resources.”

That definition can be broadened to include more than just psychological resources. We all have resources; inside and outside of ourselves. Imagine a quilt. Each patch is a resource. Each patch is someone to talk to, a book to read, exercise, eating well, prayer/faith, writing, hot running water, a car that works, a house that is fairly clean.

I feel like I have resources. I don’t always use them….

“Imbalance” is a helpful way to conceptualize how it can possibly be that one person…I’ll use myself to be fair, can have a healthy family, own a home, have a car that works, multiple family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors who all care about me and provide me with tons of help….can possibly get the level of frazzled that I get. It absolutely boggles my mind!

My husband fixes everything around here. If some piece of equipment gets faulty, he finds a way to breath new life into it so that machine can wash dishes or clothes or whatever its particular function. When I remember to think about it, I appreciate all these actions that keep our home running.

Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll look down at the little red hand that keeps track of how much gas is in the tank. The best word I can think of, for how I feel as I look at it, is Jealous. What I wish is that I could have a monitor of how much fuel I have available for the things that I want to do. This seems to be the biggest problem I encounter again and again and again.

Ideas that look good on paper are physically exhausting. I over estimate what I can do in a day, in a week, in a year. Other times, I under estimate and begin to do less and less until I feel a cold tiredness that comes…not from honest exhaustion…but from moving too little.

Keeping track is something that I used to do. Journaling was my thing for many years, until I started to think, “Who cares about this? This is boring or silly to read.” when I would pick-up an old journal from a few years back.

The benefits, though, aren’t so much that my writing is interesting as much as writing frees up space in my mind and heart to be with the people I love. The things I write about are often boring or selfish or silly or dramatizations of reality.

There I things I carry, carry, carry when the healthy thing to do would be to set that shit down.

Writing is resource.

Well, time for me and Tricia to head to church 🙂 Terra