This is the first day I’ve taken off that didn’t require some form of work in over a year.  I’ve accumulated over 4 weeks of vacation time and my brain is ready for a rest.  There were signs I needed to rest all along—the anger, the frustration, the boredom, the sadness.  And I knew that was the problem all along—I needed rest.  I needed time to integrate and recoup and understand so much of what happened the year previously and in some instances what happened throughout my life.  I had to learn to look at the story I told from a new perspective.  Growth means change and that meant looking at it differently, looking at myself differently, and behaving differently.  I ended up doing what I THOUGHT was different, which was to work on different projects.  I worked on them all at the same time and ended up buried.  I needed a change but I didn’t consider the pause—as I so often told everyone around me and as I often shared here.  I knew (know) action is the best way forward but I completely booked myself to the point I couldn’t breathe.  They were all things I wanted to do but I had no structure and I worked and worked and worked and instead of finding a way out or a way forward, I buried myself deeper, right alongside all the other things I’d thought I put behind me.

The body and mind gives signals all the time, as I mentioned above, I knew exactly what both my mind and body were telling me.  There was always something else, something that needed to be done, someone else who needed direction/instruction/consoling/comforting/reassuring.  Then people started to get angry when things fell through the cracks whether it was professionally or personally.  Instead of asking how they could help, they ignored and asked for more.  I figured since no one else saw this as a problem, perhaps I was too sensitive to the issue and I needed to buck up and double down.  And I did.  In some ways it was good because that made it painfully clear exactly what the problem was and where I didn’t fit.  The issue was trying to fit into all these different things at once, some of them weren’t even what I wanted.  I couldn’t stop to get my bearings enough to find the way.  As this year draws to a close, I feel a particular drain on my energy that’s telling me there is nothing left to give in this moment.  Projects are falling apart, a fatigue and melancholy rest over me and will not let up, a genuine depression for how things have turned out has it’s claws in me, and it seems for the first time in a while, I am out of options.  Stopping is the only thing I can do.

So I decided to take today off.  My mind still races with things I need to do, things I want to do.  But I can’t do justice to any of those things in this current state.  I need to put my energy where it belongs and right now this is about conserving what I have and reconnecting with the source.  What lights me up from within.  I spent a lot of time in the past and I’m seeing it so differently now. It’s not that I can go back or recreate what has happened and I need to stop trying to recreate that feeling for myself or for anyone.  They didn’t feel that way anyway.  This is about aligning with where I am now and setting new boundaries. There was a point I will admit I felt rest was a waste of time.  But I realized that taking the time to rest is better than the time spent redoing and fixing and backtracking would could have been avoided by simply pausing.  So, as I’ve said before.  Right now all that can be done is to stop digging and assess what’s happened.  Catch my breath.  I can’t change what happened but this is the chance to change what’s going to happen.  So breathe.