Y’all, January was a little bit difficult.
- Someone in my family had a health crisis (now resolved).
- My husband had a couple of weeks where the work stress made everything else a little difficult, too.
- I went from one minor-but-long-lasting injury to another so quickly that I only had a few days of feeling good in between.
- I got a writing-related rejection that hit pretty close to home and had me really wondering whether I should just give up.
No – none of the challenges above were particularly difficult to face. Each was pretty minor, taken on its own, and I consider myself lucky that I’m not struggling with the more serious health concerns or the kinds of financial struggles that so many other people are facing. Not to mention that I get to live in a state that’s not struggling with natural or military disaster.
So, here’s an over-simplified version of keeping my own troubles in perspective:
- Everyone in my family is back out of the hospital and doing well.
- My husband has a job, and my business is growing slowly.
- I’m still fit and healthy enough that I can complain about muscle aches that can still be treated by over-the-counter ibuprofen.
- I get to write, which is still the thing I enjoy more than anything else. I have time for it every day, and people who will cheer me on when it’s going well and hold my hand when it’s not.
There is real value in being grateful for all the ways in which I’m fortunate.
(Also, having some perspective keeps me from whining at the wrong people. I have lots of friends that are willing to listen to me complain, but some of them are going through far worse right now, so I do my best to direct the whining away from those folks, in particular.)
But there’s also a danger to always thinking about your problems with that kind of perspective.
Even little hurdles are still hurdles. They may not even be close to the worst-case scenario, but they still take both cognitive and physical effort. You still need to gather the fortitude to do the hard work that life requires, even when you’re feeling badly – both physically and emotionally.
So the danger of thinking too much about how things could be worse is that you don’t allow yourself any accommodation for how things actually are right now.
This is how that plays out for me, in case this sounds familiar:
First, I have that rush of gratitude that things aren’t as bad as they could be. So far, so good.
Next, I feel a rush of guilt, because I had dared to feel bad in the first place. Not awesome, probably not necessary, but it’s also just temporary.
Then—and this is where things really start to break down—I get frustrated with myself for not having been just as productive as I would have been under ideal circumstances. I start counting up the lost hours of productivity and the projects that are feeling behind. Without consciously realizing it, I start looking for chances to “make up the lost time,” often while the troubles that caused it are still underway.
It’s easy to see the flaw in that once you put it down in black and white, right?
And YET, it took me all month to realize what I was doing to myself. In fact, it took me until I started drafting a blog entry to summarize January to realize why I was still feeling so crummy about this month: and it isn’t because of any of those things I listed up at the beginning. I was feeling crummy because of perspective. Because I knew it could be worse, and I was therefore expecting myself to be, somehow, better than human in my response to the things going on in my life. By trying to keep things in perspective, I had, in fact, lost perspective entirely.
So, here’s my real January Update: I was human. I had good days, and I had difficult days, and I managed to get a couple of things done despite feeling kind of crummy. And now I’m taking a deep breath, and I’m going to stop looking backward. Onward, to another new month, and another fresh start.