K is for Knowing My Limits #AtoZChallenge

I hit a wall in week two of the Safer at Home order.

Then I hit a wall during week three.

See, what happened is that I was actually doing too much, still. Too much talking to people on the phone, too much walking around my neighborhood, too much being okay.

So I had two realizations during those two wall hits: I’d had enough. Of what, I wasn’t entirely sure. But I knew that I was exhausted and I felt like I didn’t have enough time and also that I was overwhelmed.

Yes, this is during self-isolation when I have nowhere to go and nowhere (save a handful of scheduled meetings) to be. I had still figured out a way to make myself busy.

It was a stroke of luck, too, that while writing my Instagram post, I looked back at my goals for this year and saw that I had written this:

The end of this last semester was a complete train wreck, in large part because I was so far behind on grading. Part of it was because of the slowdown during October’s depressive episode, but a large part of it was that my quest for a work/life balance may have skewed too far away from the work side during the semester which actually had an adverse effect on the life side when everything came due.

And then I said that my word for the year would be BALANCE because of my tendency to pendulum swing from one extreme to the other when really what I need is to find some kind of workable medium.

What has happened now is that I was trying really hard to be super good at accepting this new situation we’re in, so I threw myself into the things that I thought would make me feel better about it.

And it’s true that they did, but, you know, maybe there’s a reason I don’t have really long phone conversations with all my friends every single day of the week. There’s also a reason I don’t cook every day (don’t worry–I wasn’t that far gone that I had started doing this) and a reason I don’t work out every day.

Those things aren’t sustainable. And the pace I have been going during this past month hasn’t been sustainable either.

So I’ve had to take a good look at all the things I’ve been trying to do every single day and figure out what actually is sustainable and what I’m going to need going forward, especially since my job has moved to remote teaching for the rest of the school year.

One of those things may be putting myself on an actual schedule. Another may be to just wake up by a certain time because, if I do that, I may not need a schedule. I may also need to continue to schedule calls with friends but limit the days I do it.

I don’t know yet what changes I’ll have to make, but I do know that the fact I’ve hit my limit means that it’s time for things to change.

For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I have decided that I’m going to focus on my survival/coping strategies while practicing social distancing. What are the things that make it bearable? What helps alleviate my stress and fear–or at least what distracts me from both? Tune in tomorrow to see what I choose for L!