Balancing

A few months ago I wrote about realizing that I am a caretaker.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2017/11/i-care.html

Two months ago that got a bit scarier, when I felt a little overwhelmed with my responsibilities, based on having two sick people in the house with me and no one else. Then, when Mom never really bounced back from that, it started to feel like maybe that was going to be all I could do for a while.

We have a better understanding now of what was going on, and that's good, but there's this one area where I am still having a really hard time, and that is including self-care with my care.

There are things that I have been meaning to do for so long, but I keep putting it off because there is always something else that needs to be done. I also feel flabby, overly tired, and I don't know that a stronger immune system would have made a difference last week, but it couldn't have hurt.

I know that I need to take care of myself. I know that if I don't take care of myself, I will not be much good for anyone else. It's still really hard to get there.

When I was reading the badly-written book on Asian health secrets and the better-written but poorly thought out book on Ayurveda, one of the frustrating aspects was that there was always this assumption that something would be wrong with you: you would be out of balance in some way.

Without it making either of those books any better, I think there might be some truth in that. There are always a lot of things to attend to, and you are not getting to them all, and at some point you will need to shift in some way.

I can accept life being cyclical, and that being fine. That doesn't change that right now I am performing sub-optimally, and it's in a pretty clear direction.

One of the things I have not been spending enough time on is increasing my walking distance in preparation for the Turkey Trot. I have done a few miles, and they are fine, but one thing that I notice is that sometimes I feel this tightness in my body that it is pretty clear is stress. I don't worry about it because it is so clear that it is stress, but what is the point of clarity if you don't do anything about it?

So that's what I need to work on, and I am focusing on myself this week, even though I know there were previously existing threads that I dropped right when I started barfing.

I know I lost some readers when I stopped blogging after my computer died, and I think I lost a few this week as well. I am pretty sure that if I chose titles more carefully and promoted differently I could grow my readers that way too. Still, the most important thing right now seems to be becoming whom I need to be, and there have been messages all around about that.

Sometimes it means asking for help on something, and seeing that I can get it. Sometimes it means simply realizing that I can't do it all and prioritizing differently.

And apparently sometimes it will have to mean choosing me, but still being aware of those who rely on me.

It will have to mean finding a balance.