Too busy to live

I wrote this blog about 6 months ago and never posted it.  Just read it and I think its worth posting!  Here goes....

I am interested to discover that I am obsessed with being busy.  Even when I have a morning free when plans have been cancelled, I move onto plan B and a secondary, back-up list of to-do's that are not quite top priority but are very nice to get done if you have a spare millisecond or a free morning off.

I watched the trailer of Sarah-Jessica Parker's not-so-new movie called I Don't Know How She Does It.

  

I haven't watched the movie but the trailer said it all : we haven't got our shit together, us women who think we can parent perfectly and have a satisfying, if busy, work life.  

I recently had the privilege of making a huge mess of things with a client.  I judged the situation in a certain way and pushed too hard, the way I push myself too hard or my kids or my husband or my friends and my clients, clearly. It sent him heading for the hills, slipping away from possible growth and healing.  Is this what I wanted?  No, the very opposite.  But some people like to move slowly, and (thanks, Martha Beck) that's okay.  I forget often that I like to move slowly in certain areas of my life and are completely at a halt, a full-stop, in other areas.  We are whole human beings, with the pretty and ugly rolled into one perfect expression of ourselves.

I have navigated my life by pushing hard for the past 9 years and perhaps even before then.  I learnt that in order to be heard with a different voice, I had to be loud, determined, brave and vulnerable. And so now, I am a little like a bull in a china shop.  A little crass.  A little pushy.  Some say disrespectful.  Its true. But it is also the way I treat myself.  Always pushing, always busy, always having something to achieve. Sarah-Jessica calls it "The List".  She stays up at night running through it so that she has it down pat by the next morning, just so that she can accomplish an impossible amount of tasks, whilst she straddles the 2 opposing worlds of being a mom and an employee.

It is a crazy frenetic world we live in, if we so choose.  It is easy to get sucked up into the doing-ness of it all.  I am guilty of that alright.  And right there holding your hand throughout the whole experience is your ever-faithful servant : Anxiety.  "Let me squeeze this one thing in on my way there, and if all goes according to plan, I will be on time and would have succeeded in ticking another thing off my to-do list," I tell myself often but stress the whole way because I have almost set myself up to fail.  And being late feels anxious and like a failure.

Don't get me wrong.  Its not all bad.  I developed this trait because it served me in some way.  It allowed me to grow and overcome stuff I felt too small to do, too scared, too stupid.  But it no longer serves me.

I have never really loved opinionated, arrogant people - who does?  But here she is writing this blog.  So, my name is Donna and I am opinionated and arrogant sometimes.  It serves me when I need to be heard, when I feel small and insignificant.  But I am ready to let this go for a more powerful, truthful way of being.  I am ready to trust that I am heard and seen and loved in a healthy, powerful way, without having to exert my will on that of another.  So, here I go...softer, stronger and humbled by the lessons presented to me in the shape of a client.