Monday, May 4, 2009

Finally the end of the week

I'm way too hard on myself. Can any of you relate to that? Blech, it's horrible. I've been so busy this past week --- and I've learned that I haven't done a great job at building margins into my life. If I'm not able to get work done during the regular hours of the day, I normally stay up a tiny bit later to complete the spillover. Usually that process keeps me afloat because I'll have a few days of recovery between every late night.

When an abnormally high amount of schoolwork or friends' issues begins to peak, however, suddenly that rare late night turns into every single night of the week. I find myself at 2 in the morning thinking, "I have to get up in 4 hours. How has this happened to me again??"

And the unfortunate thing about physical/emotional exhaustion in my life is that it leads to a whole mess of new problems: I'm much less forgiving to myself, I have less energy to give to others, I start mixing up the little details one is supposed to take care of.

Plus, compassion is infinitely harder when I feel like I've been drained of every emotion I've ever had or even thought of having. Anyway, I write this just to say we all need to build some margins into our lives. Who knows, maybe all of you are better at taking care of yourselves than I am at taking care of myself. But if not, if any of this post resonates with you, then shame on you(!) ;-) you need to ease up and psh, get some sleep.

2 comments:

  1. You get up at 6am?! That is your first problem!

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  2. I think you have been extremely compassionate lately. But you are right, eventually exhaustion will catch up with you.

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