Temptations (part 1)

My biggest temptation when beginning this blog series was to list all the things I was doing at the beginning of the saying no process so that you would recognise just how busy I was. I wanted to list my job, my home duties, the care that I was taking for various people. I want you to see that I was Super Woman, that I had it all, that I was trying to do it all, that there was good reason for my near mental breakdown, for my near burnout. I wanted to justify to you my need to say no. Like it is some sort of competition: I’m so much busier than you are, when I go to work I have to walk sixteen miles through the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, and so on.

Of course, the risk was that listing all my jobs would make you  say, “is that all? I have twice as much to get through as her. What is she whinging about? Talk about first world problems.”

One of the things I have learned this year is that I don’t need to justify to anyone why I have to say no. I really did need to start saying no though.

Here’s a quote from my journal at the end of 2016:

I am still deeply emotionally fatigued. I am having trouble making decisions or forcing myself to do things that I don’t really want to do. I am feeling ready to have whole days alone right now. And yet I’ve booked coffees fro the next three days and I need more bookings to have coffee with Ruth and Jane. I think it’s possible that one coffee a day with someone won’t wreck me. But it’s hard to tell, when you are bone weary. All I want to do is sit in bed and read and write and look out at the rain.

I’d love to write a blog post but I don’t have the energy. I really want to write my novel, but no energy. I want to clean the kitchen and get groceries and do office paperwork and so on but all I really want to do is sit here in bed and write and read and sleep.

That was a journal entry in the middle of my holidays. You can hear that I needed more of a break but I wasn’t allowing myself to have it. Whatever it was that I was filling my time with, it was too much for me. Things were out of whack and I knew it. I needed to learn how to say no.

Tiredness was something I knew very well. Bone-weariness was my old friend. I am now in my forties and I had decided at the end of 2015 that I needed to improve my heath to get rid of this overwhelming tiredness. I guess that was the 2016 project.

I worked on my diet – trying to find intolerances that would mean I wasn’t getting the correct nutritional value from my food. That helped a bit, I found some things that were doing me damage and I eliminated them from my diet.

I also cut down on sugar dramatically, changing my tastes so that I didn’t crave the sugar in the coffee, the sugary treats, the constant sweets to get me through the day. That changed things too – the ups and downs of blood sugar were evened out and I wasn’t getting the mid-afternoon crashes that I had before.

I dealt with some women’s issues and sorted them and got rid of the monthly energy crisis that was being caused by them. That was great. I cannot say how much better I feel from that.

Then I went to the doctor to investigate a constantly ticking eye and severe fatigue and found that I had Graves disease – an overactive thyroid. Treatment for that meant that my legs no longer felt like they were made of concrete. That it was actually possible to get the energy to do things again. It was incredible the change it made. If you’re feeling bone weary, get your thyroid checked. It could really help.

But after all that I still felt tired.

It became embarrassing to go and see my thyroid specialist. She would say each time, “How are you feeling?” and I would say, “Tired. So tired.” And she would say, “Well, your hormone levels are great so it’s not the thyroid.”

And I would think, “Damn.”

It’s not that I wanted to be sick. But it was great to be able to blame the thyroid for the tiredness, to blame something out of my control, outside of myself. To be able to take a pill and feel better. But now I was taking the pill and still feeling bad, I knew that the change in my life had to come from me.

I had to simplify my life. I had to build in margin. I had to figure out what it was I wanted to spend my limited energy on. I had to make some difficult decisions.

I had to learn how to say no.

How about you? Are you feeling the same way? Feeling the constant overwhelm, the constant pull and tug to do the things you know you should do? Feeling that all the things on your list are completely overwhelming? Or is there some health problem that you needed to get fixed in order to get your energy levels up?

I would love to hear about it in the comments.

This post is part of a series I am writing about what I have learned about saying no. I’d love to have you join me on this journey. If you want to make sure you never miss a post, you can sign up on WordPress and the post will be sent to your email address every week without fail.

You’ll notice some new art in this series. If you want to see more of it you can find the artist on instagram @deteor42