Tired and Overextended
I’ve been overwhelmed lately. Not just in the light party conversation – oh I feel overwhelmed – kind of way, but in the – holy shit I’m drowning, wake up in night sweets kind of way. It happens to me from time to time and all I can think as to why it happens – aside from the fact that I have an essential character flaw – is that I book every spare moment with something.
Eventually that kind of behavior catches up with me and I suddenly find myself unable to meet my commitments – even the simple basic ones. I call it the trip and fall. You know the one where you’re juggling a lot of time critical or complicated things and somehow you fail to meet one deadline and wham – a pile up. You’re unable to keep juggling and recover the missed deadline. You end up with a pile of slag that takes forever to untangle. Usually, for me, it happens at a moment of complete fatigue so of course, I have no energy to even begin to deal with the aftermath.
Why do I do this? In a word, boredom – I think. Or maybe, impatience. I get impatient for things in my life to move more quickly and so I queue things up when I have a spare moment knowing that they will take time to unfold and come to completion. Like working in parallel on many things at once knowing that each thing will take a small amount of time to attend to. Only it doesn’t always work. I have a tendency to overload and overestimate my capacity or underestimate time required to complete or miscalculate the alignments and everything comes at once.
Am I remorseful? Ha! I don’t think so. Just tired… and ambitious, in my own way. I feel its a question of a feedback loop and iteratively working out the right balance so I can maintain the flow and volume of tasks. Well, who knows. On one hand I could be nuts, on the other hand I could be right. I think, or perhaps I hope, that if I can find a balance then I will be happy and not stressed.
Intellectually or logically, I can see that there are limits to my energy and time, but emotionally, I impetuously WANT and DEMAND to get these things done. I have a split personality of sorts. I think in this case the impetuous child wins out and overrules logic. Although, I like to think that logic is capable of subverting the child and surreptitiously achieving a life balance. One that doesn’t kill me – both in the process of reaching the balance and moving forward once the balance is reached.
Check back with me in 10 years and see if I’ve improved at all.
See if I’ve learned my lesson and found a better balance in life.