Letting go

And letting in

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

Does anyone else ever feel like their entire life is a game of catch up?

I have been feeling this lately, big time. Perhaps it’s being constantly sick (again! gah) or perhaps it’s being the mother of a toddler who is in school a whopping 12 hours a week, with no childcare otherwise, or perhaps it’s simply being an adult in this particular time in history that we find ourselves. Either way, it’s hard to feel like I’m alwayyyyyyys behind.

Last Monday I finally had energy again after weeks of being knocked out by some stomach bug that made me throw up for one night, and then be debilitatingly exhausted for two and a half weeks afterward. I woke up Monday morning excited to get out for a bike ride with a friend, then came home feeling energized and registered for my weight training class on Wednesday morning. It had been three weeks since I’d been able to join, and I finally felt strong enough to get back to it.

Cue me waking up Tuesday morning with sinus pain and a sore throat and sliding quickly into a cold. Literally one day of what I think of as my “normal energy” before I was back in it again. How does this happen??? I am back on the mend again, planning to ride tomorrow morning and hoping, once again, to get back to my workout class on Wednesday. But it’s been almost a month now, and I know I’ll be feeling super weak for the first few sessions back. How does this keep happening to me? Will I ever actually feel some sort of a steady state of strength and fitness again?

Visiting the doctor on Friday I asked him about how often it’s normal for someone in my position (mother of a toddler in preschool) to get sick, and he said “you should expect 8-10 viruses per year”. Given that those seem to all be condensed in the period between September through March, and that each of those can knock me out for 1-2+ weeks, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to be well.

This doesn’t leave a lot of time to be well enough to have the energy required to take care of myself, which then gives me the energy to take care of things I need to take care of in my life, which then makes me feel energized by my capacity to do the things I want to do in life, which makes me even more motivated, and on and on in that virtuous cycle that I know so well, but feels like a stranger in this phase of life.

It’s kind of daunting to think about the next few years being some version of this: Inch my way forward toward feeling strong, or organized, or on top of things in my business and my life → catch a virus that takes me out for 1-2+ weeks → inch my way back to health and the capacity to tackle things again → begin tackling everything that got neglected while I was sick → catch the next virus.

Rinse, repeat.

We took care of a bunch of home tasks this weekend, which felt great, but on my dresser I still have two separate post it notes with half finished to do lists scrawled on them, and the lingering items, some weeks old now, grate on me each time I walk past. I know I need to just get rid of these because they’re draining my energy every time I see them, but I also still need to get that shit done, and I can’t bear to transfer those same old undone things to a fresh new list. If I haven’t managed to get them done by now, when will I ever have the time??

I have a million (or more accurately, probably 5-10 per category) things I want to do on the work front, health front, home front, family front, admin front, relationship front, not to mention the writing front. Despite earnestly chipping away at each of these categories as best as I can in the time that I have, the collective weight of undone tasks gets to me some days.

Is this just something about life that I need to learn to accept? This feeling of always being behind on things, of having a million and one things I’d like to do, that I genuinely intend to do (putting together family photo albums falls into this category), but that I never seem to have the time for?

It makes me think of this Onion article from years ago that always made me laugh, about a man finally getting his life in order for 36 minutes. It’s so real, so I guess I am not the only one who feels this way. Honestly, just read it. It makes me happy every time.

There are about 45 things in line ahead of “start family album project”, but I sincerely believe that I can and should be able to get to this some time in the next six months. In all the free time I have???? I am not on social media and I don’t even really watch tv, so I genuinely don’t know what more I could do to stop wasting time and focus my energy on what matters most.

Anyway, what am I getting at here?

I guess I’m saying that it’s hard to be on top of everything, and that, despite my best intentions, many weeks I simply don’t have the time or energy to write this newsletter. I’ve decided that’s okay. I’ve decided that I’d rather post less often, but do so from a place of inspiration and excitement. I’ve realized that creating this expectation for myself and then holding it over my own head every week is not how I want to live.

So I’ll be here, hopefully often, but not every week like I’d once intended. I pulled that off for almost two full years, and now I’m giving myself the grace to let this shift to a cadence that suits where I am now.

I’m wondering if there’s something in your life that feels the same? Something that, despite your best efforts, has shifted into the land of obligation and become yet another thing you put pressure on yourself to do and then and feel badly about not doing. This is something I’m exploring lately, What can I let go of in my life so I can feel less burdened?

I’m hoping I find a few more things because, frankly, I need to pull my time and energy back from somewhere.

It makes me think of this mantra that I loved and used at some point in the last few years, but had completely forgotten about:

As I let go, I let in.

Here’s to letting go of what’s no longer working, and letting in some ease.

Until next time,

K