All my life I've been a super-achiever. I got excellent grades in school, and I was one of those annoying students who always asked my teacher why I got something wrong on a test. I had to know why it was wrong. I was super student.
My first daughter took 4-hour naps and slept through the night for 12 hours. It's really easy to be a great mom when you only have to parent in two 4-hour blocks: one in the morning before the nap, and one in the afternoon/evening after the nap. I was super mom.
Then along came my second daughter, and stress, tension, doubt, and fear entered the home as well. I was tired and cranky and didn't have the vast depths of patience I had had before my second daughter was born. I was having trouble juggling the needs of an infant with the needs of a preschooler. I was no longer, I felt, super mom.
My husband came home after one particularly horrific day, and I fled to a friend's house. She being of the touchy-feely, therapy-is-good type, we examined why I was having such difficulty. Of all the things we discussed, the shining, most revealing moment was when I said, "I don't want to be just a good mommy. I want to be an excellent mommy."
Whew. That's a lot of pressure - even I, super Dawn, can admit that.
So, now we move right along to my business and virtual assistance practice. There, too, I couldn't just be a good VA, I had to be a superb VA! I could do just about anything! And I really could, and I did. It became hard to say, "No," because I knew I could do it, and I could do it fairly well. Now, not only did I still want to be super Mommy, I wanted to be super VA. Eventually, though, I couldn't do it all.
In the past few months, I've decided that striving to be super-anything (except maybe super Dawn - for me) isn't really what I want to do. I've been feeling as if I'm on a racetrack going 100 miles an hour, and there are no exits. Heck, I'm going too fast to hear my pit crew warning me to slow down.
I did what any self-enlightened, touchy-feely woman would do. I hired a coach. (Ha!!! Got you with that one, didn't I?!!! You were sure I was going to say go to the spa or something like that!) She's absolutely fabulous, and the best thing she does for me (among many) is to tell me to sssssllllllooooooowwwwww down. Not easy to do, I'm tellin' ya.
After a particularly difficult session yesterday in which I was still feeling as if I was moving 100 miles an hour, we talked about how I'm feeling hopeless about being able to get off the racetrack and perhaps that the racing comes from trying to beat out the hopelessness. It goes something like this: I don't want to feel hopeless - I must feel responsbible - if I'm responsible, I'm not hopeless - If I'm not hopeless, I must be happy - therefore, to be happy, I must be ultra responsbible.
I didn't say it made sense! Often the beliefs through which we operate aren't logical or based in any semblance of rationality.
The bigger kicker is that, of course, along the way I lost sight of what I should be feeling most responsible for - me.
What would it feel like to not be responsible? Boy, that's going to be a hard one. What if I operated as though my happiness, success, and peace were just as important as the other things in my life? Here's an example. Yesterday, through the chaos and tumult of all this emotion and thought, I started thinking about all the work I needed to do, and it occurred to me that Saturday would be a great day to get loads and loads of work done. Yea!!! Problem solved!!!!
Then it hit me. I had gone back to the concept of work being of supreme importance over everything else. What I should have been doing was to look at Saturday with its open expanse of time and think about what I could do that would fulfill me. I could write, I could sew, I could cross-stitch, I could work on my photo albums, I could go biking.... Instead, work was the troll who popped up his head and said, "Focus on me!!!!!"
That's not the focus I want.
So, I'm going to have to shift. And while that shift seems small - all I have to do is to think differently, right? - it feels huge. I'm reminded of Newton's 1st Law of Motion: An object remains in motion or at rest unless acted on by another force. And it's that force part that feels huge. We're not talking about a tiny little nudge here. We're talking about FORCE!!!
As part of my journey to BEing, I'll need to make conscious change, which is going to require some force. While I may need to exert a lot of force (and maybe get a little muscle-sore in the process), I'm absolutely up for it in order to be super Dawn - or maybe just Dawn who doesn't have to race on the racetrack anymore.
Comments