“I don’t have time for this”
and other lies I tell myself
There’s a sort of existential panic that usually sets in for me around this time of year. Everything is too much and it all feels very noisy, including my own brain. We haven’t quite gotten up the umph to get back into routine. There’s all sorts of back to school chatter, but unlike the moms rejoicing that they’ll get their free time back with kids in school, I’m grappling with the reality that I need to both create and implement our homeschool structure. I am feeling the effects of my husband’s longer summer hours, my kids are bickering, I’m cranky and people still want to eat dinner every night1.
Having done this for a few years I know it will pass and in a few weeks we’ll have adjusted. But right now I’m tired and hot and sticky. More than that, I’m grappling with how to let go of this unhelpful thought that keeps popping up:
“I don’t have time for this.”
What is it that I don’t have time for?
Any of it! All of it! Panic! Go faster!
I almost didn’t send out a newsletter last week, and maybe I shouldn’t have. What I did send out felt a bit piecemeal and all over the place. Afterwards I felt preoccupied with the number of people who’d subscribed and how they were responding. I noticed myself grasping tightly to numbers and feeling stressed by my self imposed schedule. I tried hard to shove all that discomfort down. I did it, and it was fine. I’m fine. But I also noticed myself scrolling through Notes a bit more frantically and struggling to focus. I was preoccupied and distracted and trying to fix my weird feelings with a dopamine hit. It’s harder to do this without Instagram and therefore it was more noticeable that I was trying. And all the while, in the back of my head an annoying voice reminded me, “hey, hi. psst. this is what you do when you’re not doing well”