Stop Everything

Brb, I’m cocooning.

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

I’ve been busy. Taking actions. Spinning my wheels. Flailing around. And going nowhere.

I am so good at taking action and being productive, and I have been doing all the things: looking for freelance and consulting work; posting on social media daily; writing blog posts; responding to emails, DMs, and comments. And still, somehow, I’ve been careening toward a bottom for some time now.

A fun little quirk about me: My internal emergency alarm when something is wrong has a delayed reaction; it goes off late — too late — when things are already really, really bad and I’m firmly in a hole that I now have to dig myself out of. The problem is, I can live with and tolerate a lot of discomfort, deprivation, and being in crisis mode before I even realize that anything is amiss.

I keep having these warning signs, and they are not subtle — last month I landed in the ER, probably in large part due to stress, and last week after putting other people’s needs before my own, I wound up very sick with a migraine. And yet, I keep plowing ahead, never pausing to stop, assess, and maybe, just maybe, change direction.

If I stopped pushing ahead and took time to look around, I would notice that: