Overwhelmed...what a small word to describe such a large feeling. Can that one word truly describe the weight I feel right now, with all sides crushing in around me? Can it truly embody my experience of life throwing curve balls at me right as the crunch time of the semester begins? Can that word fully portray my stress, my failed attempts to prioritize, my feeling of being so far buried that maybe it's not even worth attempting to dig out?
NO. Yet, it's the only word we have to describe and classify these feelings. It's not just stress. It's not just depression. It's not just frustration, anxiety, or feeling lost. It's an all-encompassing mash up of all of these...one that clouds any successes, erases any hope, laughs in the face of your belief that your silly to do list will help you create a plan to get out from under its weight. It's that feeling of being a camel one straw away from breaking its back--the knowledge that one more thing, just one more insignificant little thing, will break you.
I know many, if not all, of you have been here. Whether it was life throwing you more than you thought you could handle, the last three-six weeks of a school semester when it seems that 90% of your entire 14 weeks worth of assignments are placed, or being in a room with a child or children that just won't stop screaming. Or maybe you, like me, have experienced all of these at once. Whatever your most overwhelmed moment was up until this point you clearly made it through. You may have felt broken, trampled, and/or lost...but you made it...you survived. And, hopefully it made you stronger, more resilient, more ready to take on those feelings that are way to ominous to be embodied by one tiny word.
For those of you who struggle with feeling overwhelmed, who find themselves giving up when those feelings begin to build, let me share with you how I manage it. Many people ask me how I do it. How I raise a very young family, work part time, and work towards my doctorate degree. I usually tell them, I just do. But, that's not the real answer. The real answer is I choose to fight the feeling of being overwhelmed. I do my best to bar those feelings from clouding my successes, erasing my hope, and taking away my belief that planning and pushing will lead to erasing those feelings.
Granted, this is not an easy process, but I look at it as choosing to survive rather than worry over my ability to meet every demand. I take my semester one day, one assignment at a time. I start each day with my girls as a new day and when I feel my patience slipping, which it seems to be doing by 8:30 am these days, I hold whichever one is starting to drive me crazy (if they allow me to) for a full minute, reminding myself that not every moment with her is a mini hell.
I remind myself, and, this is the important part, force myself to believe that there is an end in sight. That I am alive, that things can be so much worse, and that those things that are weighing down on me are actually things I am so very grateful for, that I would be lost without, that I could lose if I do not continue to fight and survive.
I don't want to spend my life with the mentality that life sucks and then you die and if I allow myself to spend the next five years feeling overwhelmed that will truly be my life. My life does not suck. It is hard at times and often I feel like I can't get out from under it, can't find a moment to "be me" but then I realize how I handle life, how I view life, how I manage being under it defines me. It is me. I am an individual who thrives when overwhelmed, who purposefully adds and adds and adds to my plate until it is at that point. I am overwhelmed because I want so much out of life, yet life wants so much out of me. It's a give and take and being overwhelmed is the part where you feel life is taking more from you than you are taking from it.
Good news! The pendulum almost always swings back. My plan, humble and possibly stupid as it may be, is to not only allow life to take what it needs from me, but to give it my all with the hope that pushing into it allows me to receive more when it is time for the pendulum to swing back in my direction, to receive respite from feeling overwhelmed and build my own resiliency and strength.
When were you at your most overwhelmed? How do you manage? Do you see it as an obstacle to overcome or a learning and growing process?
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