I wasn't really doing the best that I could do...
When the pandemic quarantine started, I made all sorts of plans. I came up with all manner of efficient and effective ways that I was going to use this time. Remember that? Well, I'll tell you that my motivation didn't last very long. I've played the piano exactly two times. I signed up for free online guitar lessons and dug the guitar out from under the bed but that's as far as that project progressed. I HAVE read a couple of books but even that has been very slow moving. Instead, I've put together puzzles with my daughters. I've tried to get back into the healthy habit of cooking food at home. At the end of each day, I've tended to find that I felt ok about the day but that I didn't really DO much. There was definitely a moment along the way where I was feeling really badly about my lack of ambition. I had guilt over the "wasted" time spent watching Netflix and felt really very depressed about the dirtiness of my bathroom and the project list that hadn't progressed.
Enter the internet. Everyone online was saying "Show yourself Grace". "Have a bottle of wine". "You're doing the best you can." "This is stressful and weird." So I took all of those little permissions to heart and did way less than I wanted to. I leaned into eating a bag of jelly beans in front of the television and felt ok about having a random cocktail with dinner. Do you want to know what happened? I put on weight (again). I started sleeping an awful lot more than I needed to. My house got dirtier and I felt crummier about it. I got "inexplicably" sad and my motivation dipped even further.
This is how I described my outlook to a friend via email yesterday:
"The part of my brain that talks to me tells me that I’m super happy and content and not stressed. The part of my brain that refuses to tell me what is going on just keeps eating garbage all day every day, cannot concentrate long enough to read more than a couple of pages of a book at a time and somehow convinces me that I don’t have time to go for a run."
Thankfully, I recognized that the very icky feeling in my stomach this morning as I dropped my girls off with their dad was fixable. Today I made a positive move. I had a Zoom call with my guru/therapist/homeopath/friend/cheerleader, the real life voice inside my head, my Mary. Damn her for being so darn good at asking me questions that force me to say out loud the things that I'm having a hard time admitting to myself. We discussed the things I hadn't been saying to myself and the fact that I had fallen out of the habit of doing ANY of the healthy new routines that I had recently built for myself. Then I strapped on a sports bra and went for a run during a brief break in the rain. Came home and added three items to my gratitude list and settled in for a yoga nidra meditation. Ahhhhh. I'm already feeling better.
So I appreciate all of those well-meaning people on the internet who, frankly made me feel bad for wanting to accomplish a bunch of things during this slow time. That being said, I am going to stop taking their advice. No, I do not need a bottle of wine to get through this time (or, in my case, vodka). And no, I wasn't doing the best that I can. I WILL continue to treat myself with grace. I will not beat myself up for the slump that I allowed myself to fall into. And I will be sure to check in with my inner Knowing frequently to make sure that my ambitions and goals are at a healthy level. I'll even be sure to keep up with my Netflix list. But I will also do everything that I can to get back to my new-old healthy habits and continuously be striving to be a little bit better every day. As my favorite cheetah Glennon Doyle says, "We can do hard things!" And I know that's very true.