From our walk this morning

When you are trying to write something to post every day, there are days like this. Days where there are at least three big topics you might write about, but each one feels too big and you aren’t really sure exactly what you have to say about it anyway.

For example, today I’m thinking about: how to know what to do when the symptoms you are dealing with are connected to multiple conditions, how to help someone who is struggling, and the difficulty of decluttering. In regards to the first, I was thinking this morning how some of my current primary symptoms are fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Tracing them back to a single source or cause in order to track down a fix isn’t really all that easy since besides external environmental factors out of my control and difficult to pinpoint, they are some of the key symptoms of being highly sensitive, having an autoimmune disorder, having seasonal affective disorder, being perimenopausal, and suffering from burnout — all things I’m dealing with.

Then there’s knowing someone is struggling but not knowing how to help, and how much more complicated it gets when the one(s) struggling don’t even know what they need or want or maybe they don’t think they need help or don’t want help, and they are family, and there may or may not be children involved, and doing nothing isn’t really an option.

And of the three, maybe the difficulty of decluttering seems simple, but it’s not. I brought home things that had lived in my CSU office to integrate into my home office, which was already overflowing and piling up all around me. I started by putting some things in the garage and trying to sort through them there, but that just made a whole new mess in a second location. Eric cleaned up the garage, moving all my stuff to one side, and then said recently, “maybe while I’m on break next week, we can take that stuff to Goodwill.” I said, “what stuff?”, as I’d already taken the load of what I had to donate. He answered, “that stuff on the one side” referring to my things I was sorting but certainly not yet planning to get rid of, and I responded, “that’s NOT for Goodwill!” The space I do my work in feels like it needs to be decluttered and organized before I can feel good about getting anything done in there, but each time I even think about it, I just can’t…which only keeps me stuck.

I was explaining this to my friend after we were writing together this morning. That I had all these big things to contemplate and write about but none of them seemed manageable. After listening to me talk, she said, “there are no easy answers.” She took these three seemingly unworkable ideas, the whole entire human condition, and summed it up, just like that.