Summary
- Flip the lens to see negatives from a different perspective.
- If we look at our struggles through the “life is hard” lens, we set ourselves up for a downward spiral.
I have to be honest. I have been sitting staring at a blank screen for three straight days. I am “off my game.” This column is going nowhere. Maybe it is time to cash in my chips and tally up my losses.
Seriously. I cognitively know “this too shall pass.” I know I will feel better when I finish my draft like I always do. Nonetheless, I am not feeling like writing this column.
I wonder, “Why so blue?” I reach for a gratitude entry and come up empty. It has been a “meh” month at work on multiple levels. I get that it is mostly “little things.” April’s billable hour to non-billable hour ratio is at a less than A+ level. A couple of clients whose high expectations some may consider, um, perhaps “a bit much” are “helping” more than feels beneficial. Regrettably, work is the high-water mark at the moment.
On the home front, I am flat out exhausted. I have slept in my own bed maybe five times in the last six weeks. This is a by-product of a temporary but nonetheless “new normal.” I am helping a delightfully athletic, driven, intelligent, yet boundary-pushing medical professional recover from a compression fracture incurred on the first day of her semiannual “girls’ ski trip.” Emergency surgery followed and, thankfully, all is well, medically. No matter how hard I try, I seem to do more things “wrong” in my part-time Florence Nightingale gig than right.
Alas, I am an overachiever when it comes to finding things that are negative in my life at the moment. A diplomatic characterization of our domestic engineering skills would likely rate my home as a “Felix Unger,” and hers would come in closer to an “Oscar Madison.” As such, while I bite my tongue, spending extended periods in her home causes my involuntary “Unger muscle” to spasm spastically. Just below the surface, I am living in domestic chaos and silently simmering toward a rolling boil.
When I rush back to my place to feed the cat I have been “temporarily” (going on two years) sitting, I encounter a second female who appears unhappy. She shows her displeasure in any number of ways, including breaking and entering into new sources of food in my absence.
I know self-care is important. I feed the cat, turn around, and rush out the door to my twice weekly gym class. I will “sharpen the saw” and release some beta endorphins!
Step one, I am invariably either five minutes late, or when I am on time, my heart rate monitor does not connect right away. This causes me to finish with far fewer “splat points,” leaving me deflated that I can’t even get my workouts right. (See “Felix Unger Muscle,” supra.)
Step two, I am still sitting here on deadline with a terrible case of writer’s block. This is something I enjoy, and I cannot get started! This shouldn’t be a problem. I wrote 1,000 words a week for a “perspective” column during law school. How hard can 1,200 a quarter be?
Right now, I feel like I’m running a marathon in sand. I never run more than the length of a basketball court (94 feet) in one burst, so this is really foreign territory.
Alas, I am an overachiever when it comes to finding things that are negative in my life at the moment. A diplomatic characterization of our domestic engineering skills would likely rate my home as a “Felix Unger,” and hers would come in closer to an “Oscar Madison.” As such, while I bite my tongue, spending extended periods in her home causes my involuntary “Unger muscle” to spasm spastically. Just below the surface, I am living in domestic chaos and silently simmering toward a rolling boil.
When I rush back to my place to feed the cat I have been “temporarily” (going on two years) sitting, I encounter a second female who appears unhappy. She shows her displeasure in any number of ways, including breaking and entering into new sources of food in my absence.
I know self-care is important. I feed the cat, turn around, and rush out the door to my twice weekly gym class. I will “sharpen the saw” and release some beta endorphins!
Step one, I am invariably either five minutes late, or when I am on time, my heart rate monitor does not connect right away. This causes me to finish with far fewer “splat points,” leaving me deflated that I can’t even get my workouts right. (See “Felix Unger Muscle,” supra.)
Step two, I am still sitting here on deadline with a terrible case of writer’s block. This is something I enjoy, and I cannot get started! This shouldn’t be a problem. I wrote 1,000 words a week for a “perspective” column during law school. How hard can 1,200 a quarter be?
Right now, I feel like I’m running a marathon in sand. I never run more than the length of a basketball court (94 feet) in one burst, so this is really foreign territory.
What weighs me down further is that I am the publication’s “wellness columnist,” and I am permitting myself to spiral emotionally downward. Seeking inspiration, I reach for a binder clip with a bunch of pages from the page-a-day calendars I have had on my home office desk since the late 1970s. This trick often helped when I had writer’s block in law school.
Five minutes, and nothing. Five more, strike two. Five more . . . Hey . . . Maybe it worked. . .
When I hear somebody sigh, “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”
The above quote is attributed to Sydney J. Harris, whose name seemed familiar, but whom I could not quite place. I looked him up. He was a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, an afternoon newspaper I delivered in the mid-70s when I was in grade school.
I figured his column must have rotated on the front page of the paper with the column of the “still in his prime” Mike Royko. That was the only part of the paper (beyond the sports and comics pages) that I read as a fourth and fifth grader. (I read the front page to avoid being bored while I was rolling and banding 50 copies before affixing the canvas bag to the front of my bike and delivering them.)
I went to my favorite search engine and tried a half dozen queries to test my memory. I could not determine where in the paper his column ran. But I did come across the title of his column, Things I Found While Looking For Something Else. Harris is spot on—if we look at our struggles through the “life is hard” lens, we set ourselves up for a downward spiral. I think I get it now.
All right, I will do it. Why not? After all, it seems I “found” my cure for writer’s block while looking for the location in the paper of Harris’ column!
Flipping the lens was easier than I thought. The work stuff? It’s how you look at it. The demanding clients are not frustrated with me, but rather with the other party in each case. Both had long successful careers, in part because of their intensity and attention to detail.
Each actually recognizes she or he occasionally “lashes out” because she or he feels powerless to get the adversary to move beyond emotional decision-making and focus on the commercially intelligent resolution. Each has stated appreciation for how I take the blast and, instead of escalating, often make an observation that recalibrates us all to relieve stress with a smile or laugh.
The home front? I had a conversation—a bit scary and tense at first—leveraging some of my favorite “power of vulnerability” techniques from Brené Brown (and her podcast). My patient’s face softened, and my stress shrunk as it did. She shared her feeling that the four walls of two rooms in her house had basically imprisoned her for a month. I proposed we head to a nearby mall, and I would push her in a wheelchair for some retail therapy. She chose the Mall of America, and I put on 2+ miles ferrying her around two complete levels. This was painful for a person who hates to shop, as we went slowly through perhaps every single women’s clothing store on each level. (In retrospect, I think her ask violated the Geneva Convention, but she disclaims it.)
Afterwards, she bought me lunch. Feeling a little less “housebound,” she shared how she felt powerless, confined, and a little inadequate when she considered how tidy her kitchen looked with me tending to it half time. I would not have guessed this in 1,000 years. She asked if she could stay “in the city” the next weekend. We did, and I finished my column this morning while she was sleeping.
Well, not yet. I found my mojo with a calendar quote, so it seems fitting I should finish with one:
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
My journey through this difficult spring patch mattered. So does your occasional journey through your rough patches. Keep looking for a way out. You may be amazed at the magic you find while you are looking for it.