I’ve spent some quality time investigating my grump and here is what I have come up with so far: overwork/perfectionism and diet. It’s a tried and true combination, and will work every time.
Taking a good hard look at my visitors-or-some-commitment-every-weekend routine, with in-depth discussion with DH (read: I had a total meltdown and he did good active listening and a bit of problem solving), we checked out the diary from the beginning of January to the end of March and scrutinised what we felt we could have done differently (e.g.: who we could have said no to) and we came up with maybe one visitor, who is hardly any trouble at all. I’m not going to get into details for each and every weekend, suffice to say that we didn’t feel we could refuse an invite to a cousin’s wedding; opportunities to build relationships with our egg donor and surrogate-family; friends we hadn’t seen in a year; a weekend in Perth going to the Tim Minchin concert etc et al. Nor did we WANT to refuse those events. They were all things we wanted to do.
So. I’m having a look at what I can do to change how this FEELS for me. How it translates into workload, and the feeling of overwhelm, and no time to myself. Practical stuff like asking guests to cook or bring a meal. Not cleaning the house quite so much before they come. Watching how I feel like I have to be ‘on’ every second of their visit, meeting their every need etc. Maybe just leave them to it a bit more, and get on with my own stuff. Something needs to change, in that I want to feel like I am doing less ‘work’. And I don’t want to be spending ten hours a week both preparing for guests and cleaning up after they leave, because then I have to find that ten hours from somewhere else in order to meet my home and garden requirements and then everything is feeling like a chore and I am feeling like shit.
This weekend just gone we had a friend of DH’s down, so I thought I would practice my new approach. I didn’t go to a lot of trouble on the food front. I didn’t clean the house before her arrival. I told her I had a lot of gardening that I needed to get on with, and her and DH spent about 4 hours on Saturday helping put the garlic crop in. It was very easy going, I didn’t feel overworked, and we even spent a bit of time reading not he sofa and not even talking with one another. Bliss! In this way, I got done what I wanted to do, and didn’t feel like I was just ‘working’ to please a guest all weekend. They were fitting in with me. I know this isn’t rocket science, but I really have to challenge myself on the ‘pleasing people’ front. It is a problem for me, in that it does affect my quality of life, and I am committed to letting go of it, starting now. I can see it will take a bit of practice though, and I’ll need to keep up my awareness lest I fall back into bad habits. My counsellor has returned to work and we have our first session this afternoon, so I will be jumping into this topic straight away!
As for my diet, it is significantly contributing to the grump factor. Somehow the insidious wheat and sugar have crept up to intolerable levels and are affecting my mood. I wish I could stay away from them forever, the way they make me feel irritable and sluggish and blah. But I am addicted to the part where I feel high on a rush, and it is hard. I can escape them for a while, but at some point they find their way back into my mouth. And I love them for a short time, and then they turn me bat-shit crazy. And round and round and round I go. Thank God I never got into heroin.
Last Thursday I felt like I was coming down with a cold. I didn’t go to the gym, but I didn’t exactly take it easy. Ditto Friday. Saturday I worked like a demon in the garden. Sunday I rested more in the afternoon, but still.. By Monday the cold had not been shaken, but I felt ok. I went to yoga, and had a pretty restful day. Yesterday I felt like complete and utter shit and realised that the yoga had spread the pathogens all around my body and if I was serious about getting better I had to go to bed and stay there until I was well. So that is what I did, and I am still there. And I will probably stay here for the rest of the week. I’ve worn myself out with overwork and sugar, and my adrenals are fucked and I am paying for it. You would think I would learn, wouldn’t you? I wish I would.
However. Now is all I have and now I am in bed resting. I found a couple of interesting websites to motivate me in the right direction:
heartscanblog.org
primalbody-primalmind.com
Paleo & Zone nutrition blog
I had a low carb high protein breakfast and a lemon ginger honey drink. Lots of water. There will be slow cooked chicken soup for lunch (that I made yesterday for dinner). A nap later on. A therapy session to look forward to. Some meditation. It’s taken me three months to get into this state, so I’m not getting out of it that easily. But I will be getting out of it. The buck stops here.
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