The Summer Break
A few months ago I felt deeply exhausted and overwhelmed. I had been running on fumes for a while. To exacerbate the problem, the end of the year was filling up with interstate travel and commitments. With everything ahead of me, I didn’t know how I was going to manage to get through to the studio’s close down in late December. Furthermore, if the first two interstate trips were anything to go by, things were not going to be pretty by the end of the year. As each week passed I grew increasingly concerned that the studio’s two week close-down would not be enough time to make up for the deficit I was accumulating. Something had to give.
After assessing our options, and my track record of spending significant periods of time during the holidays sick, I decided to submit an application for extended leave over the summer. I needed a break. Asking for this leave was daunting as I didn’t know how it would be received. But I knew I needed it. I think my anxiousness came from the fact that I spend so much of my time and energy trying to be normal, and in several regards masking or suppressing how I feel. So asking for special considerations can be difficult. In light of this, I am grateful it was granted without any issues.
Having the time booked in was a relief. It gave me a milestone on the horizon to fix my eyes to. At the same time I noticed a shift in my attitude: from having to make it through this busy period and keep going, to just making it through this period. I felt a similar way a few years ago when I dropped down to a four-day work week. I no longer needed to get through the week and keep going, I just needed to get through two days and then I could rest mid-week. This has been enormously beneficial as it has afforded a more sustainable pace. I also believe the flow on effect of this has been an increase in my effectiveness at work and my presence at home. I have a lot of thoughts around the need for more inclusive and flexible work arrangements, but for the sake of brevity I will leave this idea here for now.
I’m now about 10 days into my summer break and the last of the end-of-year commitments are done. I am exhausted. I love being around friends and family, but special occasions are always stressful because of my fatigue. In reflection, I wonder how this stress may be contributing to my fatigue... but again that is another thought for another day. Underlying all of this is an anxiousness of just not knowing what I’ll have in me on any particular day, and whether I’ll manage to get to the event at all. If I do, I don’t know whether I’ll just be there physically, but be totally checked out mentally. This feeling frustrates me because all my energy is going into holding it together rather than being able to engage at the level I so desperately want to. The event ends and then I’m either left kicking myself because I know I’ve been holding back in order to try and get through the event or I am completely exhausted and have no idea how long it will take for me to recover.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. Improving my capacity, being kinder to myself, maybe better communicating my needs. Maybe a combination of all three? Furthermore, I don’t know whether it is denial, or something else, but my limitations still feel foreign. I know this sounds odd given I’ve lived with a chronic health condition for seven years now, but let me try and explain this further. It it not a consequence of being oblivious. I know I have limitations. I see how my limitations effect my life, but when I think of myself I don’t always take them into consideration. They’re not a part of my self identity. This works both for and against me. It works for me because I set expectations that things can be better — that I won’t let my condition dictate what I can and can’t do. It works against me because this attitude leaves little room for self understanding and empathy when things don’t go to plan. More consequently, it leaves a whole lot of room for burn out if I misjudge my capacity. In many regards, I feel like I live a life of contradictions between ability and disability and at the end of the day I desperately just want stability. If I am honest with myself maybe I just want to be better. I’ve heard the saying a few times recently ‘the healthy have a thousand dreams, the sick only one’.
During this break my intentions were to ‘get life sorted’. To catch up on all of the things I had pushed to the side during the year to survive. My imagined utopia seemed achievable before I actually had to implement it. After developing a list of things to do with Jess I realised both the enormity of the task and how this could quickly turn into another boom and bust situation. If I am honest with myself, I think I also realised the danger of a re-surfacing pattern forming. Again, for the sake of brevity, I won’t go into this pattern in too much detail but I will provide a short overview.
In the past I’ve lived with a mentality that life will be better once I reach a ‘life destination’. To a degree, such an assumption is not inaccurate, as a lot of these destinations are indeed better (if you’re willing to stay there and soak in the view), however I have a habit of changing the destination to somewhere further along the way before stopping to appreciate my progress. This leaves me in a perpetual state of ‘going’ and never getting closure or celebrating. In schema therapy this most closely resembles a schema called unrelenting standards.
I don’t have a solution to this pattern yet, but I am more aware of it now than I have been in the past. The idea of not completing my list and reaching the projected destination before returning to work makes me feel uncomfortable. Previously, I would just put my head down and push myself to extreme lengths to get everything done. But that isn’t an option now, and more importantly this behaviour was never sustainable in the first place.
So rather than trying to reach a destination by a set time, I am working on shifting my focus to setting up systems that will keep me on the right path. From this perspective I can be grateful for the vision and direction that this list provides. So rather than fixate on everything that can’t be done, my focus will be on creating visibility and organising these items into priorities. I can then chip away at these as I have capacity.
A practical example of this is a change I’ve made to my Running Rare chapters. In the first two years I set myself a distance and a date to complete the distance by. Such an approach became too rigid and resulted in all of my energy going into running and neglecting a more beneficial cross-training approach. It also resulted in me collapsing in a heap at the end of each chapter and not exercising at all for several months afterwards. This year the plan is a little different. No set distance and no set time-frame, just a desire to run 100 times for 100 different rare diseases. My aim is to run every second day, but if this isn’t sustainable for my body, the aim will be to just get moving for 30 minutes. To keep it manageable and not load my body too quickly I’m also restricting myself to 1km runs to start off with. This third chapter, and this time of extended leave, is about sustainability and habit building for the long term, not arriving at an arbitrary destination in a set-time frame.
You can keep track of Chapter Three on my website and instagram.
Happy New Year.
T
Just a few of the great
articles that have been published in the last month.
I can relate to so much of this mate and your levels of self-reflection and awareness is off the charts!!!
"I don’t know what the solution to this is. Improving my capacity, being kinder to myself, maybe better communicating my needs. Maybe a combination of all three?"
I think it's combination of all 3, but being systematic by knocking one over at time is how'd I approached it, and would start with communicating your needs more, as you already proven recently that you can push thru the uncomfortableness of asking for what you need.
Great read Tim, I'm glad you put your needs first this time and that your workplace was supportive by granting it to you.
When you think about it, we are driven by achievements our whole lives. In schools it's getting good grades and winning awards, junior sports is trophies and winning player of the week, winning the game. Success is measured by most by what your job is or the stuff you own, the car you drive, the house you live in. This is what makes us miserable, not to mention constantly being shown by media and advertising how inadequate we are. Social media is supposed to be a platform for sharing, but not only does it consume us, it leads to comparing lives to others. Thankfully I have never felt this social media jealousy or comparison, but I have heard stories about people being depressed after using their instagram because they're looking at all their friends or people they follow living their best life, not realising that the majority only post about the best parts of their life.
When we see people we generally say hello, how are you? The automatic reply is good thanks, regardless of how we are feeling. I'm not sure people are prepared for a response that isn't I'm good. But I believe this honesty is contagious, so the more we are honest, the more others will be too. It'll normalise having a shit day or feeling shitty and that it's okay not to be great all the time.