When You Are Stuck

I never had any intentions of quitting blogging. It just happened. I know now there wasn't any one reason, but a host of reasons put together. Combine the reasons, and blogging was one of the first things to go. In late October of 2017 after yet another visit to my nurse practitioner because I was feeling extremely tired, she suggested that I see a life coach, because I was healthy (despite being about 30 lbs overweight. Yup I am).

I was pretty excited to get started, but the first visit was not very encouraging. I actually left feeling even more frustrated with myself. I was overwhelmed with life. A asked me what I was doing that made me feel accomplished. She wanted to know what I did each day that made me feel good about myself. I didn't have an answer to that. Oh I did lots during the day and a lot of sitting doing nothing between getting the what I felt I must do's done, but none of it was anything that made me excited about my life. I was given homework for that week. I was to try to spend each day meditating for five minutes. I was a little leery at first. Meditate? Isn't that some new age thing? Actually, it isn't. It is just sitting completely quiet for five minutes focusing solely on your breathing and pushing away all the distractions that pop into your mind while sitting there. It results in bringing a little more clarity throughout the day.

After about three visits, I was feeling better about life. I was motivated in the mornings and the desire to sit and do nothing all day began to disappear. I had been stuck. I was in a rut. I lacked motivation to do anything for myself because whenever I did I felt like there were other more important things that I should be doing. The reason I didn't notice the feeling until almost November every year is due to stress. Having a house full of children in the summer -- especially our two youngest -- creates a large stressor for me. Truthfully I am not even aware of it, but my body is, and it takes almost two months for it to realize it doesn't have to be on high alert from dawn to bedtime anymore. Sounds crazy, I know, but our two youngest children are very high maintenance and cannot be left alone for more than ten minutes or so, as they tend to like to find trouble. This in turn causes me to have to keep an eye on them from the time they get up until they go to bed. It is a lot of work.

By the time they have all been back in school for almost two months, my body just wants to shut down completely. I felt tired all the time. A gave me ways to cope with the exhaustion and I have been feeling good. Some days I am legitimately tired because I went to bed to late. On the days that I do feel overtired, I give myself permission to just be and not feel guilty about it.

I am nervous about how I will handle the summer this year, but I will go to see A in June and perhaps again through July and August. This autumn I will at least know why I am so tired if I end up that way again and I can work through it.

In the end it was encouraging to know that I was simply -- stuck. Nothing major was wrong with me. I just needed to see myself as a person again. Not in a selfish way, but in a way that makes me aware of what my body and even my mind are telling me.

Now to figure out how to drop those thirty pounds!