As life inches ever more swiftly forward, seemingly moving inexorably faster and faster as I get older and older, I have begun to learn a painful truth about myself: my motivation comes from outside instead of within.
If you give me a project or a task or ask me to do something for you? Not only will I do it, but I will blast it out of the park.
You need someone to take care of a difficult, tedious or challenging thing? I am your girl, with bells on and will likely stay and do even more than you asked me to do, volunteering to add to my load just to make you happier.
There is a scene in Eat, Pray, Love where Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert is giving a lecture about the "permeable membrane" that she becomes in a relationship, losing her own sense of self inside her perception of what the other person wants her to be, subsumed by the fantasy of being what she thinks they want instead of standing as her own, self-contained person and believing that she as herself would be more than enough. The first time I saw that scene in the movie, I wept like crazy.
Lately, I have been feeling like the permeable membrane writ large.
This is partly because I'm just exhausted this week. Too many late evenings coupled with too many early mornings and way too much running around trying to take care of every little tiny thing for everyone in my life all at one time and nothing around the edges for down time for me. I am horrible about carving out my own boundaries and will, instead, give and give and give until there is nothing left and I am forced to crawl into bed and sleep until I can get up and do it all over again.
This worked when I was younger, but is not so good now that I have lupus. Worse, I am having to learn that lesson about moderation and balance over and over again because I cannot seem to stop myself from overdoing it in the service of other people's needs (or what I perceive them to be, anyway).
It comes from growing up in a family where learning to be a people pleaser was a survival skill, I suppose. But somehow the lesson that I internalized was that it wasn't enough to just make people happy, you had to be perfect at it. So much so that you exceed expectations at all times and when you do not hit that mark? Then you are a failure, plain and simple.
You cannot imagine the amount of resentment and self-loathing that builds up from living this way. Or maybe you can, if you are a fellow Type A people pleaser.
It gets worse when you couple it with an inordinately ginormous need for achievement and a competitive drive to do better by striving to best my own expectations for pretty much any task I set for myself. It's like being Martha Stewart on steroids some days, which either drives you way, way too far on the exhaustion scale or leaves you utterly frozen, knowing that you cannot do something perfectly so you just don't do it at all. Or, more accurately, you do the things that others need or want first and leave the things for you off the table because then you can at least exceed everyone else's expectations and leave yours for another day.
What I have been trying to learn -- or at least to re-learn internally -- is that more often than not what I want for myself is a better answer. Not what I think someone else wants from me, but what I, in my heart of hearts, want.
And that everything doesn't have to be perfect. Good enough is more than okay.
It's a tough thing to do, to listen to yourself when you have effectively shut off your own voice for years, but I am working on it.
I realized last night that while stagnation is bad for me in so many ways, it is good for one thing: as a catalyst for me to force myself to listen to that inner voice that is clamoring for me to reach further, higher, faster, and harder toward my own inner sun.
Standing still is almost painful for me...but reaching outside my usual boxes is terrifying. When I start feeling a bit stagnant and predictable, though, the urge to change course toward something I really want begins to grow. It is almost as if forcing myself into a corner not entirely of my choosing makes me chafe to break free toward a more desirable direction of my own.
This seems to be a common point of discussion among a lot of moms that I know: taking care of everyone else leaves me no energy to take care of myself, and that is not okay. But neglecting everyone else in order to put myself first all the time is not okay, either. Finding some measure of balance is key, apparently, but quite frankly, I really suck at that.
What I am going to do today is take a little time for me. Write in a journal for a bit. Think about a few things that I can do that will take better care of me, but not in a way that makes me feel like a selfish, neglectful prat, because taking care of my family -- whom I love more than life itself, truly -- is just not an acceptable sacrifice on this path.
My goal is to try to listen a little more to my own internal voice, to reach out and turn a bit more toward my own inner sun. To listen to the quiet stillness within and see what I have to say...and to work on a little bit better balance.
If nothing else, I'll get a little quiet time today and relax a little before I have to pick-up or errand run or whatever else needs doing in the moment. That's never a bad thing, right?
(Photo via Claudio.Ar. Lovely shot!)
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