Truth Bomb Tuesday: Sometimes you just can’t. That’s a blessing.
I think I have pro-noia – the sneaking suspicion that everyone and everything is out to help me.
It’s a belief I’ve cultivated over the years. I’m aware that it may just be a delusion, but it’s a delusion that makes life more fun. It’s a delusion that opens me up to more possibilities and abundance. So, you know, it’s working for me.
(Get off my cloud man.)
And so when it was my turn to take some time out with Covid, I found myself curious. Is there a lesson here? What is this showing me?
And one of the things that I noticed personally, and I’m curious to see if other people had a similar experience, is that Covid brought with it a particular kind of fatigue.
To me it felt different from the usual fatigue you get with colds and viruses – the kind of tired that just has you going, ‘stuff it. I’m staying in bed.’
No, to me it felt much deeper. I found I wasn’t just fatigued in a bodily sense. I was fatigued in a deep mental sense.
And what it felt like to me is that a lot of the mental structures I had built to help manage aspects of my life that weren’t ideal – I just didn’t have the energy for them anymore.
How can I give you an example without giving too much away? So, there was something that was grating on me in my relationship. Still totally in love. Best man ever and all that. But you know, there was this one thing that wasn’t working for me.
And what I realised is that I had developed a coping strategy. I self-soothed. I stroked my forehead and said, “There, there Dymphna. I know you don’t like it. But maybe if you just have patience it will shift.”
And I had developed a mental short-cut that went something like, “When this situation happens, deploy self-soothing.”
But what I found with Covid is that I just didn’t have the energy for that self-soothing any more. It just felt like it required more energy than I had.
And I also felt that even that decision rule – the mental construct that I had built – I couldn’t hold that up anymore either.
This is more than just being tired and grumpy, when things that don’t normally bother you start to bother you.
This was different. This was feeling like I just didn’t have the energy for self-soothing and maintaining distracting mental constructs – the stuff you do to put up with stuff you don’t actually like.
And most importantly, that I didn’t have the energy to sustain the things I wasn’t even conscious that I was doing!
This happened in a few aspects of my life.
And by the end of it, it felt like a profound gift. I had become very conscious of the aspects of my life that weren’t working, and the energy it took to soothe myself through those aspects.
It was the kick in the pants I needed to just take some responsibility and shift those aspects.
I hope that’s all making sense.
But at the end of the day, Covid show me areas of my life that were draining me of energy, and showed me that things had to change.
I’m grateful for that.
So I don’t know. Maybe I’m painting a silver lining on a cloud that doesn’t actually have one, but I feel like Covid left me with something valuable.
How about you?
DB.