A few weeks ago I shared in a subscriber email that I was struggling with a spot of depression. (A spot that, thankfully, seems to have moved on now.)
Someone wrote back to me in a comment, (not in a malicious way), that it was a relief to hear ‘even people like you don’t always have it all together’.
I remarked back to her that no one, literally no one, has it all together. Ever!
Everyone I know, no matter how bright and shiny their life looks on the surface, has stuff they’re dealing on a daily basis.
Now I don’t know about those people, but I, personally, don’t tend to don’t share that stuff because:
- I like to present a positive face to the world.
- I consider my ‘stuff’ to be generally boring.
But in the interests of transparency, mixed with my deep fear of being thought to only ever share the ‘bright and shiny’, here are five ways I currently don’t have my shit together:
1. I’m thinking about money too much
I’ve always had a funny relationship with money. Money was scarce when I was a kid and that continued when I became an adult. (You know – that whole ‘my paycheque is spent before it even hits my bank account’ thing.) And it was especially scarce in the early years of my business.
Currently, for me, money isn’t abundant. But it’s also not what any reasonable person would call ‘scarce’ either. Try telling that to my brain. When it comes to money it seems to think there are only two states: “We’ll be out on the street tomorrow if we’re not careful,” and “Hooray, so much money I don’t have to think about money.” The former is where my brain is at right now no matter how much I try to rationalise with it.
2. I’m eating too much
I’m not sure what’s triggered this off, (ok, I do, it’s probably stress), but I’m eating too much. It’s all really good, nutritious food – but I am eating too much of it. I’ve worked very hard over the past five or so years to approach eating in a healthy fashion but have slipped in the past few months and now am back to thinking about food all the time. This is not where I want to be.
3. I’m not getting quite enough sleep
I need seven hours of sleep a night to thrive and I’m currently getting around six hours because it’s taking me a bit longer than normal to fall asleep at night. Again, this is probably a stress thing and I have many tactics to deal with it … but I can only deal with one thing at a time and my key priority at the moment is calming my brain down about money.
4. My kids are spending far too much time on screens
I’m finding that right now, I’m mentally fried by 5pm in the afternoon. This means I have zero tolerance for whining and acting out from my kids. Which is a problem isn’t it? Because by 5pm they, too, are tired and inclined to whine and act out. So I send them away from me to watch tv or play on their iPads because if they’re not on those things, they require me to do stuff with them or referee their arguments and I just don’t have the energy. I don’t like how much I’m outsourcing my parenting to these devices currently.
5. I’m spending far too much time in my head
Which means I appear vague, distracted and unavailable to the people around me. Especially the people I love the most and spend the most time with. Not ideal.
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But … here’s the kicker team. Despite the multitude of ways I currently don’t have my shit together:
- I still have the ability to laugh at, and with, my kids.
- I still have time to lie in Ant’s arms in bed for 10 minutes in the morning when our alarms go off.
- I’m doing good work here and here.
- I’m still finding time to write stuff I am really proud of.
- I still have a lot of whitespace.
- I might be pretty tired right now, but I’m also pretty happy and content with life.
How can this be?
Well it’s because happiness and contentment don’t come from having it all together folks. It comes from being able to cut ourselves slack for the areas where we don’t have it together. And from being both aware of, and grateful for, the areas that we do.