Feeling overextended isn’t always about how much we are asked to do. Often, it’s about the expectations we place on ourselves and the pressure to meet every demand perfectly. In a quiet moment of surrender, lying on my bedroom floor, I rediscovered that pausing is not indulgent. It is essential. This reflection explores the hidden …
Recognizing the Weight
This past week, when my beautiful and brilliant coach innocently asked “How are you?” I immediately barked, “Overextended.”. It was the word that has been pounding in my mind and chest for weeks, building pressure with no outlet until she, specifically, asked. This is one of the incredible gifts of the work that we do, to create this space. It’s a heartwarming honor to be the outlet for honesty and untethered support for someone. It’s something we rarely have the awareness or courage to ask for and, even when we do, are not always able to receive.
For months, my sessions with her have been a godsend for maneuvering and managing a business with so many other obligations. We talk about strategy and next steps. This Monday night, however, I simply melted. She heard the sadness, the anger, the humor, and the chaos of my previous few weeks. In the end, we did not plan my next step forward. We planned my pause. Every Friday morning in my calendar, where I would typically try to schedule a client or volunteer a Reiki session, there is now an hour and a half slot entitled “Do me”. As soon as my boys are on the bus, before I schedule any appointments or login to my full-time job, I am to do absolutely nothing but exactly what I want. Amazing, right?! It’s okay if you feel some kind of way about this right now. So did I. How dare I be so bold as to take this time? How spoiled? How selfish? I asked myself all of these questions, which is precisely why I needed to do it.
It is not the rules or expectations that are put upon us that feel so heavy. It is the ones that we put upon ourselves.
The Spiral Before the Stillness
On my first Friday morning, as soon as the boys got on the bus, I started to spiral. I wanted to read, write, take a bath, fold the laundry, wash the sheets, clean the bathrooms, organize the growing piles of paperwork, complete any one of my countless unfinished chapters or blog posts, pay my bills and create a budget, call every one of my girlfriends and give them my full, undivided and uninterrupted attention, go for a run, get a manicure and pedicure, take a yoga class, and meditate. The decision of how to spend the next 90-120 minutes of my morning began to blend into the mounting pressure that I had been feeling leading up to this idea. Then I remembered something that we talked about during our conversation. It was my own words from one of our first sessions that my coach repeated back to me. “You could just lay on the floor if you want”. So that is exactly what I did.
For 15 minutes, from my bedroom floor, surrounded by the book, dirty towels, pair of glasses, and coffee mug that I had been carrying, I participated in a fruitless staring contest with my ceiling. As I lay there, the past few weeks of parenting, performing, partnering, purpose and professional work replayed in my mind. As the memories rolled on, I applied my own RAW knowing. I followed my own advice and released judgment, reviewing things that I had said, had been said to me, mistakes made, small triumphs, moments of help and hurt. I physically felt the experiences within me, allowing my emotions and subtle body to relive and release. I let the waves come without trying to fight or figure out anything.
And the result was my greatest memory, not of circumstance but of certainty.
The Expectations That Exhaust Us
It is not the rules or expectations that are put upon us that feel so heavy. It is the ones that we put upon ourselves. It is not our employer’s deadline or agenda, a conflict with a friend, parent or partner, our children’s need for attention, a missed fight or opportunity, or the traffic on our way to work that weighs on us. The weight is the misunderstanding that it is our job to immediately meet or mediate any demand or desire. It’s the fear that if we are late, if we are wrong, or even confidently right, if our body doesn’t look or function in a way that we would like, if we miss a deadline or detail, if we are misunderstood or unapologetically ourselves, something will fall apart. We will have done something wrong. We will somehow be unworthy. And this fear of not enoughness is where our shame, our blame, and our spiral takes root.
The truth though, dearest soul, is that the expectation of overproductiveness is counterproductive. It’s paralyzing. And the only person who decides if you are lovable, if you are worthy, or the value that you add to this world is you. You are the keeper of your expectations; the keeper of recorded desires and demands. You are the only one who can steady yourself or fall. You may not be the only voice to have shaped your perception of your worth, but you are the one who gets to decide which voices you continue to carry.
Remembering Your Worth In Ordinary Moments
There’s a current TikTok trend going around trying to prove that AI has ego by asking if humans are better than it. Hundreds of videos of people asking artificial intelligence questions about being human vs being artificial intelligence, and asking with an air of superiority which is better. Here’s the real question though. Why do we need to ask? Artificial intelligence does not have ego. It doesn’t even have an existence without us. It doesn’t have a concept of better or worse. We do. We apply this concept to every sensory experience that we have. What we eat, what we see, what we read, what we smell, what we hear. Something is either good or bad. It’s better or it’s worse. Perhaps the most unfortunate implementation of these concepts is when we apply it to ourselves.
My fragile human ego would love to believe that a single invitation from me to see yourself as the incredible miracle that you are would be enough for you to recognize the truth in that statement. But we are not all ready to see ourselves as miraculous. We are not all ready to see ourselves as fundamentally worthy just for existing. We do it when we’re ready.
So instead of an invitation to remember this yourself, I offer you a reminder to return to when you need it. You are whole exactly as you are. In traffic, in the waiting room at the doctors office, applying for unemployment, in the checkout line when your card is declined, when you have over or undershared, celebrating a hard earned promotion or laying on your bedroom floor… You are valuable and you are worthy, just as you are. There is nowhere, and certainly no one, else that you need to be.
References
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271-299.
- Neff, K. (2003). Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself.
- Pignatiello, G. A., Martin, R. J., & Hickman, R. L., Jr (2020). Decision fatigue: A conceptual analysis. Journal of health psychology, 25(1), 123–135.
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