Fighting sadness

The last couple of weeks have been very challenging for me. My father is aging poorly and that upsets me immensely. I can handle the fact that he will not be here forever, or at least at this point in my life I believe that I will be able to handle it when he goes. What I am struggling with is the fact that he is relatively young, but his mind and body seem to be 20 years older than his age might suggest. To me, that seems like a terrible way to live.

I live very far away from him, so I am frustrated by my inability to help him in a regular hands-on way. But now that I have spent two weeks with him, I realize that there is only so much I could do even if I were closer. None of this makes for a happy person at all.

I am struggling to keep myself above the emotional water line. My husband is busy with two jobs so I know he is there for me emotionally, but I am not seeing him as much as I would like. My best friend has been extremely supportive, but she too is far away and that limits her ability to distract me (although IM has helped me somewhat).

What I am craving doing right now is taking a day to wallow in my sadness. I think if I get one day just to be sad I will be able to climb out ok. What I don't have is a day to do any wallowing. So I am pushing though. Maybe that is the better answer anyway. Who knows.

Two steps forward, one step back

I understand that people develop incrementally and that get one thing does not a whole picture make. That doesn't mean that I can't get horribly frustrated that when it happens.

I have been mentoring someone for a while, and honestly, it took a while to see progress. Then we went from sitting up to walking in what seemed like a day. Now we seem to be back in the crawling stage. The progress is still there, but it is coming at the expense of some previous progress.

But I am being good and there is no strangulation taking place. I am taking a deep breath and tomorrow I will deal with what did not get dealt with and try to undo what was done and keep mentoring until we have actual liftoff.

Sigh.

Procrastination is making me wait...

Some days I am totally on the ball. Other days I dodge my work by...doing other work. Ok, I know that may not seem like true procrastination, but trust me, it is.

I tend to have a long to-do list and if I were honest with myself, I would know that I could never get through it. However there are days when I make an honest attempt and days when I look around and try to find anything else to do. Today was one of those latter days.

But, sometimes accomplishment happens despite our best efforts. While writing this blog post I closed the loop on something I have been working on for MONTHS!!!!!!!!!!! This is a big deal.

So, I guess I will get away with today's slacking and call it good. And as an added bonus, I just struck a I have no idea what I was going to say there. I got distracted several times and lost my train of thought.

Oh wait, I remember now. I struck a deal where I get to go home soon and bake a lot because tomorrow is one employee's last day and two employees' first day. Go me!

Taking too much responsibility

I spend a lot of time anticipating people's moods/needs and doing my best to address those needs. But that really takes time and energy away from focusing on my own moods and needs. I tend not to stop until I drop and I rarely give in to my own desires. Usually I can get away with it, but lately I have been feeling it too much. Apparently my body has decided to lodge a protest.

Despite an increasing feeling of marshmallow brain (a condition usually resolved by sleeping) my body has gone into active rebellion. I woke up at 11 yesterday evening after a 4 hour nap, but then failed to go back to sleep until 3. Then I woke up at 9 this morning, and despite being barely able to keep my eyes open, I cannot sleep.

I know of two reasons for this, but I know of no easily implemented solutions. The first is that I have not given myself time and space to process the emotions around issues with a friend. I have been pushing them aside to be dealt with "later," but not identifying when that later would be. The second is that I am now trying to schedule my sleep sessions.

I see Exemplary D so rarely these days, that I schedule my sleep sessions so that I will be awake when he returns. Part of that is for me, but a large part is not. He is going through some hard issues himself at work these days (and yesterday's issues were really doozys) and I know that whether he asks for it or not, he will need me around to process this afternoon when he returns. So in anticipation of having to get up, my body said "screw you, you want to get up. I'll make you get up" and here I am.

I want to learn how to take less responsibility for everything around me, but people have come to rely on it, and I am nothing if not reliable. See the evil cycle I have created for myself?

So I guess I will go stare at some cheesy '70's drama and hope that I manage to take a nap. At least until Exemplary D gets home...

So I have been told...

...that one should not blog more than once in a day because it discourages people from reading old posts. But given that my readership is basically at one, I am ignoring that rule.

This post's theme is about the deflated feeling I get when there are two many concurrent problems that I cannot solve. I am a type-A personality (some would say an A+++personality) and so I abhor sitting around. I am, at the heart of it, a problem solver. I am also fairly good at recognizing when problems are somebody else's to solve (ok, ok, I am working at being fairly good at it) and backing away.

But then there are the times when it is my problem, but I do not have the skills or knowledge to fix the problem and it is therefore in somebody else's hands. That is when I should pass over the responsibility and go on to the next thing. But usually I just end up feeling defeated.

So although I have a lot of productive work that I could be doing right now, instead I am poking around the web looking for someone or something to entertain me. But, one of the other bonus features of this state of mind is a short attention span. So reading an actual (short) blog post feels too hard.

This state of mind then creates a lovely feedback loop of misery. God, I just so love Mondays.

The pendulum of life

note to self: referencing songs, however obliquely in posts will create an instant ear worm.
(For those of you who don't immediately get the reference, look here).

Given that my Grand Business Scheme (GBS) has been in operation for 19 months, you would think that I would be used to the unpredictability of my days. But nope. That is not the case at all.

This morning I woke up from a somewhat disturbing dream where I was steadfastly refusing to participate in the taking of graduation photos. The thing is, I haven't been in school for 11 years and I have never been particularly resistant to graduation photos. I might think this was a variant of my usual school anxiety dream (in which I realize on the day of the final that I have forgotten to go to Spanish class all semester), but that doesn't feel quite right.

While in the shower, I went from musing about the meaning of my dream to thinking about how I wanted to narrate my presentation for Ignite Portland. Then I started drafting blog posts in my head. Then everything got shot to hell.

Our network was reconfigured a bit Friday night and seemed to work when we all groggily wandered out at 11:30 (after having arrived at work at 6:45 am). Nothing weird or amiss happened Saturday, but apparently it was just waiting to leap upon us on Monday morning.

Most of us are fine. But we new users can't authenticate to the network. And we can't configure our phones. So, once again, Monday is devouring my soul.

Resiliency

I like to think that I am tough. I tend to assume most people know what they are talking about, so I take critiques very seriously. This generally works well for me because people are willing to be honest with me when they know I make a point of listening to what they say. The problem in this situation is that these were not general circumstances.

Sometimes people focus more on themselves than on the other person (or the situation at large) when they are offering critiques and that can muck up the flow of communication.

I just suffered from one such incident that took me down for about a day. The critique did have some fair points, but there were enough "inaccuracies"--by which I mean that one's perspective made all the difference--that I found the entire exchange deflating and disheartening. Add in some complex relationship histories and the whole thing just devastated me.

I successfully fought the temptation to get into a pissing match and point out all of the places where I disagreed. I was actually pretty proud of myself for that. But, I remain left with an unmet need to respond. I played with the idea of responding but not sending the response. But everytime I thought about that it just made me tired.

So, I decided to start this blog instead. I feel this is a more productive and positive way to direct my energy and I have been looking for an outlet for those thoughts that don't belong on any of the other blogs I post to.

And how am I feeling today? Actually, pretty good.