Keeping It Real About How Much We’re Pushing Through
And this week's happy yes, food for thought on knowing yourself, and some recommendations
Happy Yes: Serendipitous malarkey
Do you ever have someone cancel or something go wrong and find yourself breathing a big sigh of relief that you’re off the hook or feeling grateful because now you can attend to something else that you needed, but struggled, to prioritise? This was me last Wednesday when I felt banjoed after an intense personal training session the day before.
It started with realising I’d double booked myself at 4 pm and having to cancel. Then my 3 pm was a no-show due to a mix-up, so I had an impromptu nap. Then I set off just after four with my daughter for her appointment, turned the corner, and realised we had a puncture so headed home just as the stormy weather picked up. Farewell appointment and quick jaunt to the supermarket. After a few calls and the RAC turning up within a couple of hours to fix the tyre, I gave up on any notion of cooking dinner, ordered a takeaway, and damn near did a jig on the way to bed. While I could have felt stressed by the afternoon’s chaos, it benefitted me.
In more serendipitous malarkey, I realised I’d accidentally posted on Instagram twice after not posting on there for months. I know I’m not alone in finding Instagram to be a stressful, noisy place that can make you unsure of how to show up on there. So I don’t. Baffled, I eventually worked out that the culprit is Facebook. I’ve been posting on Baggage Reclaim’s Facebook page each day this month as part of mini experiment. After switching to a new phone on Thursday, it must have changed the settings in the app. But I laughed at the mayhem of it all because it cut through overthinking and made me realise that, if I want to, there are simple, low-energy ways of showing up.
Last week’s malarkey reminded me that sometimes it’s what’s out of your control that gives you what you need but also that sometimes your slip-ups help you out.
🧠Food for thought on knowing yourself
“…my hesitation isn’t really about the money, it’s about what I’m promising to myself if I hit that buy button.”
While Jen was talking about marketing advice and sales, her insight reminded me of what our decisions and choices mean — potentially committing to being a different version of ourselves. Of course, sometimes our hesitation might be a sign that what we’re about to commit to is off base. Still, it’s worth noting whether there’s a theme to our hesitation. Do we hesitate about what amounts to variations of the same promise because we’re avoiding making that commitment to ourselves, trying to be an idealised version of ourselves that doesn’t match who we are and truly want to be, or we know that saying yes would be doing the same thing and expecting different results?
Sometimes we get too hung up on the fact that we hesitated or the thing we’re hesitating about and don’t necessarily acknowledge the commitment to some form of transformation behind it. If we did more of the latter, we’d have a clearer understanding of when to back our yeses and nos. We would feel more confident in trusting ourselves
📖 I’m about to finish reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver for family book club tomorrow. Described as a retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, a book I haven’t read, so that doesn’t mean anything to me, it’s a gritty, relentless tale of a boy who seems destined not to amount to much due to the circumstance of where he’s born, his parents, and the drugs and neglect that ail his community. At 560 pages, it’s a chunky, thought-provoking read that shines a light on some of the jacked-up inequalities in society. Reading it also kept reminding me of Heaven by Virginia Andrews (yes, she of Flowers in the Attic fame), which is also set in Virginia and tackles similar themes. I haven’t read it since my teens but I’m going to have to re-read, for sure!
🎧 My husband Em, who turned 51 yesterday, recently guested on our friend and famalam Karen Arthur’s radio show about some of his experiences growing up, the women in his life, and what he knows about menopause. Previously, he’d only ever been on a couple of episodes of my podcast The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, so it was fab to hear him in a totally new context while chatting out my business 🤣
On A social life, with friends, a podcast by lovely
, we chatted about reframing people pleasing and being okay with disappointing others. I’ve also been on the Brave New Girls podcast talking about the ripple effect of learning to say no.A while back, I shared lessons from a year of low energy. Turns out, plenty of you resonated with how I’ve been feeling—thank you. Pondering pushing through (versus resting, stopping or slowing down) over the last several weeks made me notice how much of my life involved it. When we were in Thailand in December, it didn’t feel like that. Day-to-day life, though, has more pushing than I’m comfortable with.
Life is full, and plenty of it is in good ways, but how I operate along with life’s inevitable stresses and challenges means I’m often using more energy than I have. Even though I actively go out of my way to expect less of myself, it turns out, I still expect a lot! My current energy levels, along with what I’m doing or not doing to restore and increase them, don’t match my expectations and some of the demands of my life.
I think many people feel like me. We just keep expanding to accommodate various aspects of our lives even as we experience more stress, loss and difficult emotions. We shift through life stages and wrestle with pandemics, neurodiversity, disability, illness, bereavement, redundancy, fertility issues, birth, perimenopause, menopause, loved ones’ struggles, financial insecurity, the ics and the isms, breakups, divorce, fallouts, anxiety about war and the future, and the list goes on.
In an ideal world where you always operate from a boundaried place, so with awareness of your bandwidth, intentions, values and basically yourself, pushing through is something you do occasionally instead of what might be every. single. day, possibly as a way of life.
But while we all still need to create healthier boundaries, we exist in a world where we have things going on in our lives, never mind what’s going on in the world at large. We have responsibilities, goals, desires, needs, expectations (ours and other people’s). We have bodies and energy levels that are sometimes at odds with our heartfelt desires and happy commitments, never mind our obligations, so sometimes we need to chivvy ourselves along. Let us also not forget the emotional baggage gremlins that sometimes drive a lot of how we show up (e.g. people pleasing, perfectionism, overgiving) and pop up to pee on our confidence parade so that we doubt ourselves.
It’s also crucial to acknowledge something about the world: Twenty-five-plus years ago, we didn’t live, work and socialise how we do now. Never, in the history of humans, have we ever been so exposed to each other; to so much audio and visual noise with a window into each other’s lives.
Many of us operate at a level that humans aren't designed for, resembling factory machines with never-ending energy and constant overstimulation, all while thinking this is the norm. It’s no wonder many of us are tired or even burnt out. There is a lot of ‘pushing through’, and as a typical way of being, it's not good for our bodies or our poor nervous systems because it means we are constantly overriding, dismissing, and ignoring ourselves.
Humans push through fatigue, pain, discomfort, low motivation, boredom, the truth, resistance, doubt, fear, and limits.
There are times, of course, when pushing through is useful. For instance, if we based our perceptions of our capabilities on what we’ve decided we can and can’t do and old identities, we wouldn’t grow or be vulnerable enough to put ourselves out there. Like when I had to do my first deadlift a couple of weeks back and panicked that I’d drop the bar on myself and be crushed like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Then I finally lifted 30kg and did it another two times straight after. Similarly, if we only honoured our commitments based on our moods, we’d do a hell of a lot less, too.
Sometimes you push through because it’s the final push; the end is in sight, and you dig into your reserves and give it everything you’ve got because it will be over soon. Imagine, though, that this is your everyday reality! Then it just feels like there’s no end in sight and that you’re grinding away on this hamster wheel.
In some instances, you push through despite feeling like you don’t have the physical or mental energy to do so. Like the afternoon (or whatever time) slump where you’re counting down until work is over. Again, though, what if every or most days feel like this?
Maybe you push through because you’re dealing with a number of factors that impact your cognitive and emotional load. If they weren’t there, you’d just be going about your business, but they are, so you’re maybe on guard or hyper vigilant, possibly without even knowing it. It could be you’re masking neurodiversity, or navigating gaslight-y and microaggression-y folks. If you have to be in an environment where you’re navigating ‘isms’ and phobic behaviours, yeah, there’s a lot of straining your way through life.
Sometimes you feel flattened emotionally, and it sucks the energy out of you. Grief. After dad died, I didn’t have the capacity for anything unnecessary, which turned out to be a lot. When I attempted to ‘get back to normality’ around eight weeks after, I didn’t fit back into my old life. It felt like everything drained the frick out of me, leaving me baffled as to how I used to do so much. Months of this led to lots of saying no and taking time out to recalibrate.
Maybe you feel flattened on all fronts because you’ve said yes to too many things that weren’t your responsibility or made yourself chase after things in a way that wasn’t in alignment with who you really are, aka burnout. You’ve pushed through so much that you’re pushing through the effects of pushing through, not realising you’re teetering on the brink of meltdown.