What to Do When You Don't Have the Capacity for Everything
What gives when everything in your life is lifing hard?
We have been finishing out the last few weeks of summer, which is absolute chaos. Especially with needing to put a close to summer with putting the pool away, changing out closets for school, and everything that I need to do and everything I am still forgetting to do. You know the drill.
Work has been working me instead of the other way around. We have had an ongoing billing issue that has reached a point where I need to be fully present to ensure it gets resolved. At the exact same time staff turnover occurs. Which means my very part time presence has turned into glued to my phone putting out fires. I wish I could convey my very loud eye roll properly here.
Finally I have been trying to build my website for what I actually want to be doing, where my blog and resources can sit. But of course what I want and need don’t always line up with what reality will allow.
This is where I was burning out fast. I tried to maintain everything for longer than I was capable of, and eventually something had to give. I must have sat at my computer over a dozen times over the last few weeks, trying to force myself to write but I didn’t have a single creative thought to give. Turns out creativity doesn’t flow when you’re trying to do it through the mud.
So in my situation the blog gave. And it has been hard, because that’s something I genuinely want to do.
I honestly don’t know if I made the right decision. I know there will be some facets of people who totally agree, that obviously you need to protect your livelihood and spend quality time with your kids. Then there will be others that say you should prioritize your wants too because they matter.
Here’s the funny thing, both camps are right.
And that brings me back to the nuance of capacity. I felt stretched so thin that when it came time to “prioritize” what I actually wanted, that felt like one more decision, one more should do, one more thing I couldn’t give all of myself to.
But now sitting at my computer, things are a little different. School has started, the pool is put away, I have done all I can do with staffing, and billing issues for the time being. Now I feel like I have crawled out of the mud, energized and I am ready to start writing again. Welcome back capacity. I know I am happy to be back.
Still here,
Bethany, RN, NC-BC
Protection, understanding, and unruly confidence.
-Nettles
