Recently i've felt like a hamster running around in a wheel but never seeming to get anywhere. I've had endless to-do lists, ticking one thing off only to find that another thing has been added to my list. I feel drained and run down, which is probably why on Friday I lost my voice and i'm now suffering with a chest infection. My body has made me stop because I was pusing myself too hard. It's a pattern in my life, I push myself too hard, get ill and have to stop, vow never to do it again, then recover and the cycle begins once more. I'm a compulsive overworker, I constantly try and squeeze a little bit more out of my day, the phrase "i'll just do this" is a recurring thought and I constantly fill my days with a list of 'shoulds'. In the process of doing this i'm so busy ticking off things from my list that I don't actually live my life and savour it.
It didn't actually hit me what an ingrained problem this was until a recent fallout with my partner where she claimed that I constantly tell her what to do - "you need to do this, you need to do that", she threw at me. It was only when I tried to explain to her that I wasn't ordering her around, I was only offering up suggestions that I realised there may be a problem - telling someone what they "need" or "should" do is very different from making suggestions in a "how about trying/doing this" kind of way. I use exactly the same phrases for myself, when planning my days they consist of "shoulds" and "needs", they're quite forceful words, I need to be gentler with myself and others.
This morning I woke up with a feeling that I need to change. I guess that the fallout along with being ill has opened my eyes and made me realise that my expectations of myself (and others) are too high and whilst I have recently felt snowed under with a massive workload, part of that pressure has been self-inflicted. From today I will try to slow down and try and live more consciously, the days are whizzing by and they shouldn't be. I'll try to be gentler with myself and rein myself back in when I start composing my list of 'shoulds'.
