Are you on someone's Meltdown Watch List?

“She was drowning but nobody saw her struggle.”

This quote pops up on my Pinterest feed from time to time (often attributed to Hamlet – um really?) and it always reminds me of the private struggles of so many people, particularly women, in maintaining the façade of I’m-beyond-busy but-it’s-totally-fine-I-can-handle-it while internally they are falling apart. What I’m talking about is the unwinnable battle to meet our own, and others’, expectations of what a full and successful life looks like, and the toll that takes on our physical, mental and emotional health.

The refusal to ask for help because everyone else seems to be coping (top tip: they are not), and that would appear weak. And how we worsen that struggle by keeping it private.

This is particularly relevant at the moment because so many of my daily angel card readings have been urging us all to slow down, say ‘no’ more often and to make finding peace a priority.*

A friend of mine recently joked about adding a mutual friend’s name to their Meltdown Watch List. This is kinda funny, but also kinda not. Because it’s true.

I know people with so many balls in the air they can no longer see the clouds. They have children, ailing parents, relentless business demands, high-maintenance landlords, gruelling deadlines, overgrown lawns, intense exercise routines, friends they never see and relationships under strain. I know you know people like this too. Perhaps you ARE that person.

I have a friend who works 60+ hours a week. She went to see her doctor because she couldn’t figure out why she was in tears almost every day. The doctor prescribed anti-depressants to allow her to continue with her relentless schedule (instead of listening to the messages her body is sending her, urging her to stop). It’s clear to me she’s not depressed – she’s exhausted.

I find the thought process that drives this lifestyle really interesting – the ways we delude ourselves that prolonged exhaustion is normal and that we can continue to live at break-neck speed. Memo from your body: you cannot.

Recently I interviewed holistic nutritionist

Dr Libby Weaver

for a

Women’s Health

magazine story about exhaustion. She talked about how women are paying a high price for trying to do everything at once, and refusing to stop. The result is everything from weight gain to digestive issues, fertility problems and prolonged moodiness.

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Guys, life is busy. I can’t change that, and neither can you. Also, I don’t have kids, so I feel like I can’t fully understand the scale of difficulty involved in finding stillness when you have a family. I don’t know how you can make your life more manageable but I do know that if you have good reason to believe you are on someone’s Meltdown Watch List, you have to ask yourself some serious questions about the way you’re living. You can have everything you want – your mum was right about that – but not all at once.

If you are drowning, you must call for a lifeguard. Your lifeguards are your partner, your siblings, your closest confidantes and your most trusted work colleagues – these people are your support team. If they know that you are struggling, they can help you find solutions to move forward.

This team does not, however, include people who are draining your mental or physical energy with their demands. When it comes to dealing with those people, learn to say no. Saying no is a difficult thing for many women because we worry that it means people won’t like us. But here’s the truth: if relationships with these people are worth their mettle, they will be robust enough to cope with you cancelling coffee dates or refusing to babysit their raucous children every week/help plan their wedding/drive for two hours to groom their pony. Say no (especially to the pony thing; that’s ridiculous) without fear of fallout. You are the only one in charge of your physical and emotional health; protect these priceless resources by deciding what is most important in your life. Prioritise those things, then relax your standards on what is not.

You can stop drowning right now.

*If you’re not across my daily card readings, follow me on Instagram

@onegroundedangel

or like my

One Grounded Angel

page on Facebook.

Ready, set, procrastinate!

There’s a mouldy nectarine in the bottom of my fridge. It’s been about a week since I first noticed it, and I have continued to notice it, several times a day, without doing anything about it. The nectarine continues to rot, and I continue to ignore it. It’s a bit of a shit Mexican standoff really; of course the nectarine will ultimately win, and all of my fresh vegies will lose, which means I lose. And yet despite knowing that the mess in the vegie drawer is getting worse the longer I delay throwing out that nectarine, I continue to ignore the problem. Gross.

I’m not telling you about my nectarine sitch to explain how desperately my vegie drawer needs a solid clean – and I want to assure you that the rest of my house is very tidy and hygienic – but because it illustrates in a really disgusting way just how procrastination has taken hold of my life lately.

Here is a list of things I need to do that I have been putting off for a month or so, some trivial, others fairly pressing:

·                     ·      Locking in dates for my trip to New York this winter. (Note to self: it is officially Autumn now. Autumn is followed by winter. That means winter is happening very soon. Pull your finger out!)

·                     ·      Getting a new gym program. I am so booored by my workouts that I’m putting very little effort in (counter-productive, no?). Some days I don’t even sweat. If I’m going to drag my ass out of bed at 5.30am you’d think I’d be committed to making the most of this time. But somehow the effort of booking a personal trainer to create a new program for me keeps falling into the ‘I’ll do it next week’ category.

·                     ·      Following through on all the angel card readings I have promised people. It’s not that I don’t want to do the readings, I just never quite get around to locking them in.

·                     ·      Sorting out my accounting records. Yuck.

·                     ·      Getting some new meditation podcasts. I feel like I’m not going deep enough with my meditations at the moment, and not getting the clarity I used to. This something I really I need to address, or else I’m going to find my ability to manage stress and the general challenges of everyday life will be seriously hampered, and I’ll start getting stuck.

·                     ·      Finishing the two new short stories I’ve started and polishing two older ones to be entered in competitions (one of my goals this year).

·                     ·      Enrolling in more volunteering projects (another key 2015 goal).

When I look at this list, there’s a common denominator. It’s so obvious that Fear is at play behind my decision to delay/avoid all of these tasks. I don’t want to tackle my accounting records because they never add up properly at first and it takes hours longer than it should and it’s frustrating and I’m scared I will realise I’m too stupid to manage being self-employed. I don’t want to plan my New York trip because I’m scared I will find that I can’t afford it, and have to ditch the whole idea. I don’t want to find new meditation podcasts because I’m scared they might be too hard, and will prove that, actually, I really suck at meditation and will never improve. I don’t want to do more angel card readings for my friends because I’m scared the messages I give people might not be meaningful to them or will reveal stuff they don’t want to hear and they’ll hold that against me and tell other people I’m crap and WHAT IF THAT’S TRUE?!

Wow.

In short, I’m scared I’m not good enough. I’m scared I will fail. So basically I’m scared of the same stuff you, and every other person on this planet, is scared of – and that’s why I’m procrastinating.

But here’s the thing about Fear: it only holds its power over you for as long as there is an absence of proof that the things you are scared of could happen. And the only way to know if that proof exists is to do what you’re scared of. Yuck. The good news: through that process one of two things will happen: you will find that the thing you were scared of was never really there, or you will find that you can handle it. That’s a win-win situation.

I know all of this, and yet I continue to procrastinate. I’m putting a stop to that right now. You all are my witnesses. I’ve set myself a challenge to tick as many of these things off my list as I can by April 16 (four weeks away).

I’ll start with that nectarine. 


UPDATE: Since writing this post, my housemate has thrown out the rotten fruit and cleaned out the vegie drawer. Subsequent laboratory testing has revealed it was a peach, not a nectarine. All is well.

Choose your own creative adventure

Last weekend I went to a session with that quick-witted word-sorceress Liz Gilbert (#fangirlmoment) at the Sydney Opera House, as part of a series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day. If you follow Liz on Facebook or have seen her inspiring TED talk about creativity you’ll know this bestselling author has made it her mission to inspire everyone to “get out of your own way” when it comes to unleashing the creative being that lies within all of us.*

It’s a worthy mission. In our haste to increase our incomes, enhance our love lives, climb the career ladder and just cope with the busyness of life, the desire to indulge our creativity tends to fall by the wayside. But it’s not an indulgence at all.

Even if you don’t want to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture or write the next Fifty Shades of Grey (please don’t; the literary world deserves better), spending more time being creative can have some pretty awesome flow-on effects – greater happiness and a sense of purpose being chief among them. It also keeps you focused – especially if you have a ‘1’ in your numerology, like I do. Liz says that if she doesn’t have a creative project on the go, she starts destroying relationships with those around her. Ouch! “A creative mind is like a border collie. If you don’t give it a job to do, it will find a job – and you won’t like the job it finds for itself,” she explains.

The benefits of creativity are not in creating a one-of-a-kind, precious product, they're in the process of creating. And it’s not just about art, drama or writing. Raising children is a creative endeavour and so too are exercise, cooking and reading.

There are myriad reasons most people put off that creative project they’ve long been dreaming of. Here is a small selection Liz mentioned in her talk:

• Someone else is already doing this (or: EVERYONE else is already doing this)
•   I haven’t got the time/money/energy
•  I’m no good at this
•   There’s no point
•   I’m not ready
• I’m too fat (WTF? Apparently this is an actual reason people give)

All of these are just excuses we create because we’re deeply afraid we’re not good enough, which is a common fear. But it's something we have to learn to get past. Creativity requires us to reach beyond our safety zone, which is something the subconscious regards as very, very dangerous. “Fear will always be provoked by creativity, because creativity asks us to enter into realms of uncertain outcomes,” Liz says. And that, of course, is when growth, both creative and emotional, happens.

Liz’s approach is not to try and eliminate Fear** completely – because it never goes away, ever – but to accommodate it, then ignore it and go ahead and follow the creative path anyway. Without that strategy she might never have had such a remarkable career. She tells Fear: “You get a vote, but you do not get a voice.”

I went home after this talk and dug out the short stories I had abandoned late last year because I thought they were shit. They may well be shit but as Liz has reminded me, there’s every reason to keep going with them, if for no other benefit than the joy of the process.

Time to put my border collie on a shorter leash.

*I’ve written about this before; read my previous post here.

**Eagle-eyed readers will notice I always capitalise Fear. There’s a reason for that. my experience of Fear is that it is powerful it has often stood over me like a bully, so that’s why I personify it.

On necessary heartbreak

"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

I’ve never met a Rumi line I didn’t love, and this sentence is one of my absolute favourites. It reminds me of a quote I read last year by the peerless Cheryl Strayed. Someone had written a letter to her ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column (BTW if you’re not familiar with the Dear Sugar series, you are truly missing out) asking what advice she would give to her twentysomething self.
Her characteristically eloquent response included reference to her decision to divorce her husband in her mid-twenties. She had still loved him, but even though she could not say why, she knew she didn’t belong in the relationship anymore. Cheryl closed with this quote, which I have loved ever since and never forgotten: “Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

When I first read this, it leaped off the page and dug its steely fingers around my own silently shattering heart. You know that feeling, I know you do. Something resonates with you so strongly you’re sure it was written just for you, just for that moment. It is the truest thing of all the true things that have ever been before. At the time I was in the process of completely uprooting my life in New Zealand and moving to Australia for no good reason other than the fact that I could not stay. And no matter how many times people asked me why I was leaving, I could not produce a better answer than “I need a change” – as if this were sufficient to justify the wrench of leaving all the people I loved. If you’re going to leave behind the people who define you, bolster you and imbue your life with so much meaning, you’d want to have a very good reason. I didn’t. Staying meant stagnation, but leaving meant losing so much. I knew ultimately that I would gain in the long run, but in that moment, surrounded by boxes, Customs forms and piles of the objects that had amounted to my life in Auckland, I could only see the losses.

You must be strong enough to break your own heart. Friends, I held these words to my chest and I repeated them at 2am when fear and despair kept me from sleep. I uttered them when I found myself shaking in the toilets at work and in the evenings when I ran out of tissues to collect my tears. These words reminded me that I had to do the thing I did not want to do – even though it made no sense - and proffered the dimmest promise of finding hope on the other side.

We do not grow when we stay stuck, we grow when we take risks and follow our instincts, even when common sense and peer pressure do not support us in those actions. I broke my own heart and I found – as I had suspected it would – that the being strong made me even stronger. It was the right thing and the best thing to do, and it was worth all the tears and all the despair.

My affection for Cheryl’s prose is matched only by my adoration of Rumi, and I firmly believe there is Rumi line for every occasion. On the subject of necessary heartbreak, he offers this: “The wound is the place where the light enters.”

And where light enters, growth happens.

(That last sentence is mine, but you can use it.)

Have you ever broken your own heart? I’d like to give you a high-five. And a hug. Because that is an act of bravado, not to mention self-love. Email me your story here.

Very superstitious, writing's on the wall

Yesterday I dropped a knife when I was doing the dishes, and it reminded me how a girl I used to be friends with years ago was so uber superstitious she would refuse to pick up a knife from the floor. (Apparently this is bad luck; who knew?!) She was very dismissive of religion on the grounds that there is no proof of a higher power, yet she regarded old wives’ tales with a kind of paranoid reverence (#irony). Now, while I respect everybody’s right to believe in what they want to believe in – so long as they are not hurting other people, nor shoving their faith down other people’s throats, of course – when it comes to superstitions, I’m baffled.

It’s madness, if you think about it, that people can act, even on a subconscious level, according to such random rules: if I don’t walk under a ladder, nothing bad will happen to me. If I wait until I’m outside before I put up my umbrella, I will be safe from misfortune. If I see a black cat but walk around it so that it does not cross my path, I’ll have a great day.

And even more bizarrely: if two bad things happen to me in a row, something else bad is going to happen, because bad luck happens in threes. What this means: therefore I accept my fate to have a shitty time and I will sit around and expect that result, and feel a twisted sort of vindication when it does, even though I’m really pissed off about said misfortune. Which inevitably means something bad will happen, because they’re constantly affirming that result to the universe so that’s what they attract. Ridic!

This reminds me of Harry Potter (to be fair, EVERYTHING reminds me of Harry Potter), when our hero pretends to give Ron the felix felicis “lucky” potion before a major game of quidditch. The potion works because Ron believes himself to be lucky, and that mindset is what attracts his good fortune, resulting in him delivering a solid performance on the pitch. Sort of the placebo effect, if you like. 

Although I don’t go out of my way to walk under ladders I certainly don’t bother to avoid them. I wouldn’t despair over a broken mirror and I have no fear of the number 13.

About a year ago I interviewed a psychologist about superstitions for a magazine article (a very random story, that one) and he said that the reason people embrace these rules, even though they know they’re silly, is a desire to have some control over the uncontrollable.

Holding on to superstitious beliefs also helps alleviate people’s anxiety over the unknown. After all, we live in an uncertain world . Sometimes, he told me, a false sense of certainty is more comforting than none at all. This makes sense. Except, it also doesn’t.

People, we don’t have a lot of control over what life throws at us, but we do always have the power to choose our response. In short: attitude is our superpower. And that is what ultimately attracts better fortune into our world.

In 1944 psychiatrist Victor Frankl was sent to a concentration camp, where his wife and parents died. It was a life of abject misery, every day a fight for survival amid unimaginable suffering. And yet, as his exalted book Man’s Search for Meaning details, he dedicated his days to finding happiness in the most bleak of circumstances. He wrote: “The last of one’s freedoms is the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

So, tell me again how you think breaking a mirror means your life is doomed?

Yes, I know it’s not a fair comparison, but my point stands. The course of your life is not governed by random events that, centuries ago, some old wives connected with misfortune. Bad things will happen to you, but they have f**k-all to do with dropped knives. You will be fine, no matter what happens, as long as you set your attitude. Pick up the knife. Be positive. Be resilient. Believe in hope. You hold all the cards.