Tainted

It is so hard for me, lately, to feel positive about one thing in isolation, without it being tainted by (my own doing?) negative feelings about something else.

That was not coherent.
(This – another level of understanding of my 5th grade student who, told me, “I know it in my brain but I can’t explain it.”)

Anyway. I feel good about having cleaned the kitchen, but then discouraged that I didn’t clean anywhere else. Good that I caught up with a friend, bad that there are 3 other people I need to call. Proud that I wrote a blog post, defeated that I didn’t respond to my emails. Accomplished and strong for going to the gym, discouraged that I didn’t do more there. It’s so easy to fall into that perfectionistic way of being. It’s so easy to let successes be tainted. Well – am I letting it, or is it just happening? Am I doing it to myself (blame?) or is it just occurring (cop-out?)? Does it matter?

For the record – staying present, in the moment, is not always as easy as we make it out to be.

Author
Speech-Language Pathologist. Nature-loving, book-reading, coffee-drinking, mismatched-socks-wearing, Autism-Awesomeness-finder, sensitive-soul Bostonian.

One comment

  1. I soooo get it. I don’t strive for perfection, exactly, but I guess I have high expectations of what I should be able to accomplish, which aren’t easy to live up to or really even remotely realistic. Unsurprisingly, this often leaves me in a state of profound exhaustion with deep feelings of inadequacy.

    Well-meaning people are always telling me, “Just let stuff go! You have to learn to relax, don’t worry about the housework.” But the thing is, I am literally incapable of doing things half way…it’s pretty much all or nothing with me. Once I start to let a few things here and there slide, well, before long I find myself suffocating, buried beneath a giant avalanche of laundry and bills and school papers, and dirty bathrooms, and the next thing I know, the electricity’s been shut off because somehow the importance of getting that bill paid just..escaped me for the past 2 months.

    It’s at this point (while ruminating in the candlelight on my failures as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, employee, friend) that I wake to the realization that I need (and my family needs me to!) claw my way up out of the depths of this forlorn resignation and malaise that I have allowed to insidiously suffuse my psyche. Thus begins the slow process of reevaluating and reassessing priorities, and learning to accept the things I do not have the power to change (today), and to allow myself to be proud my accomplishments each day, small as they may be, and regardless of what did not get checked off the to-do list. It is a difficult process for me, but I am learning the importance of being as gentle with myself as I am with my loved ones. After all, if I am falling apart, I am no good to them. I am a work in progress, but one that is worth the effort.

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