What if examining your life just sucks? What if examining your life doesn’t define it, but helps you define you? What if there’s just a really painful part of deciding who you want to be in this world and once you get through that, you find self-acceptance?
Maybe some people who seem to have it a bit more together in the area of self-acceptance just did the work to get there a little earlier in life? Maybe I’m just a late bloomer. And maybe that’s ok.
This meme makes sense why trying to allow myself to feel this year has been so frustrating. Gratitude and joy I understand. I have made many calls to my sponsor this year “I’m feeling something, it’s not a happy feeling but I don’t know what it is?”
I’ve said “I feel like I’m as emotionally intelligent as a five year old.” At my core I’ve always lived with the feeling that if everyone around me is happy, I’m happy. If everyone around me was not happy, I’ve been like a heat seeking missile trying to make them happy.
With my feelings, if I can’t figure it out, I dismiss it. If I don’t like it, it’s ugly, I dismiss it. Yet it’s still there, under the surface affecting who I am in my world.
I’ve been so confused. I feel a little lost. I love my kids. Yesterday I couldn’t stand them. I wanted to shake them! Just be happy. Don’t bicker with each other, don’t roll your eyes at me and don’t make me feel like I’m a monster for asking you to help with something small. I wanna light up with joy when I see them, not look at them with contempt.
I think I ignore bad behavior or attitudes to keep the peace….ignore, ignore, ignore, blow my cork.
I have become quite withdrawn this year. I feel like I spend more time observing my life than I do living it. I’m spending more time in my head than I am in relationship with others.
I’m content to be alone. That’s new. I’m content to quietly work in whatever it is I’m working on. I’m not slowing down. There’s still always five projects I’m working on, but I don’t feel the same need to be in constant communication with people.
I feel sort of detached. While it doesn’t feel bad inside, it has people on the outside concerned. I’m different. I hear “are you ok?” I think I am? When I take a birds eye view I think “am I ok?” I don’t act like “Donna” used to act very often anymore. Then again, I wasn’t a fan of her. I wanted her to change. Now that she has I wonder “is the change good?”
I’ve started consistently taking my Adderall. Doctor suggested it might help with my inattention. I am staying more on task. I am less likely to jump in and interrupt conversations. I’m less impulsive. I’m less social, but that seemed to be a consequence of a month of silence and subsequent whirlwind of personal growth.
Learning to set and enforce healthy boundaries is hard work. Learning to allow and name difficult emotions is hard work. Learning to accept what you see when you examine your life is emotionally exhausting.
Socrates says “an unexamined life is not worth living.”
Maybe I still haven’t found exactly who I am? I spent the majority of my life focusing on trying to make the people around me like me, so much so that it didn’t matter if I even knew or liked who I was.
I think when I wasn’t worried how people saw me, in moments of uninhibited self, I may have been considered “obnoxious” by some, I could have been seen as overly talkative or self-interested by others but I was joyfully living in the moment.
Self-reflection and medication probably make me more “palatable” socially, but I feel like this year has put a wet blanket on my personality. Maybe it’s good and I just haven’t adjusted to it? Maybe it’s not good and I need to back up? Maybe it’s neither good or bad, just different?
It’s Christmas Eve and my poor hubby had to go to work. I guess wounds and ostomy’s don’t take a break for the holidays. As for me, I’m peacefully sitting with a cup of peppermint tea, my laptop and my Bible with soft Christmas music playing in the kitchen getting ready for my daily Facebook live Bible reading. I read on live cause it helps keep me engaged, and I’ve heard it’s encouraging my friends to get in the word, so win-win.
October 21 I started reading Genesis with the intent of reading start to finish with no timeline other than read something everyday. I’m in Psalms, but I’ve slowed on that reading to read one chapter of Luke each day in December. Today is the final chapter….I know Jesus is gonna come back to life and meet His disciples on the road to Emmaus. What a beautiful ending to what feels like a tragic story! I can only imagine the “holy crap!” moment I’d have if I was there when we finally realized it was really Him!
That is the why behind Christmas for people who claim to be followers of Christ. That is my why, but how does one live that out? I feel like the giving of gifts was maybe originally intended to remind us of the gift God gave us when He sent His son? That’s the only way I could wrap my brain around the fact that we get gifts for Jesus’s birthday.
I love that my sister usually makes a birthday cake for Jesus! I love that my Dad has always insisted on reading the birth story in Luke before we open gifts. I’m thankful to come from a family who focuses on the meaning of Christmas….Christ with us.
The older I get, the more conflicted I get about the holidays and my ADHD diagnosis a couple years ago helped me to sort out some of the confusion. November and December has always been a neurotic mess for me. Gifts are like this giant snowball that when it starts on the hill, it gets bigger and bigger and picks up so much snow that by the bottom of the hill, it could kill you if you got in its way.
The year of my diagnosis, I decided that I was gonna try to simplify my Christmas to help slow down my crazy ADHD brain. I had a list of under 20 people I was going to shop for…my immediate family and my husband’s immediate family. By the time I was done, I had shopped for 54 people I love, taken over 100 gifts (from the Dollar Tree but wrapped) to nursing homes Christmas caroling with young people in my life, four names off the angel tree, 14 Operation Christmas Child boxes made with the kids in my life and 150 Christmas cards sent.
I couldn’t do it. I failed to slow it down and that season was once again spent neurotically running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to spread holiday cheer and the day after Christmas I was so overwhelmed with it all, I just wanted to pull down the tree and lights so I could have a whole ten months till I got that crazy again.
I’m happy to report about this year…just a couple years and a lot of growth. I mailed one gift each straight from the vendor to family in California and my sister-in-law graciously agreed to wrap them. I am giving my husband family moments, and we collectively got my girls one thing they asked for and a couple little things we thought they could use. I sent out less than 10 cards, and mainly to people who I didn’t want to feel forgotten this time of year.
There were a couple opportunities for generosity which I totally enjoyed, providing a tree, decorations and stockings for a family, providing a meal at the Ronald McDonald House for family’s stuck at the hospital for the holidays, and a couple smaller things.
My kids commented “it doesn’t feel like Christmas for some reason this year.” I asked “what have you done for someone who couldn’t do it for themselves? Have you planned a gift for anyone?” The answer was no. They have since started thinking about others and magically it feels like Christmas even at 60 degrees outside!
Writing this post makes me think, maybe Christmas feels to my kids like a neurotic mama, wrapping paper and tape, stacks of cards and stamps and stress everywhere. Here on Christmas Eve, I regret nothing. I feel more peaceful this Christmas Eve than I think I ever have. We had a small gathering of my Toastmaster’s Club last night for snacks and games, we are having a candlelight Christmas service at church at 1pm, and dinner with Uncle Adam and Auntie E tonight. Tomorrow morning we will have Christmas with my parents, my brother, his girlfriend and sister’s family, then we are serving dinner for Celebrate Recovery at church. Thursday is dinner for 40 at the Ronald McDonald House.
The gift this year is the gift of our presence.
I didn’t get as many Christmas cards as I got when I used to send them out. Family always sends a card and we put them on the tree to open on Christmas. We got a couple from my husband’s co-workers and one or two more, but not like we used to. Maybe Christmas cards are like chainmail from the 80s? If you don’t send them out, you don’t get them back?
Contagious Joy With Donna Sanchez 