I really appreciate this illustration. While I cannot speak for others, I find that it rings quite true for me. Budgeting my life has become a necessity, more so than for others. When I think through activities I plan to partake in throughout the week, I have to assign them a value – an estimate of how much energy I think each activity will require. But what happens when your week deviates from your stringent calculations, and the realities of life don’t match your calculations on paper? What happens when a family member has a personal crisis? Someone you love has a terrible accident? Work takes more out of you than normal? Allergies knock you down? What happens when there are successive weeks of this?
NOTHING; nothing happens.
Dishes and laundry pile up. Grocery shopping doesn’t happen. Your car, once pristine, slowly begins to look as if you live in it; you start to suspect that the baristas at your nearby drive-thru Starbucks recognize your voice, and you’re too tired to think anything other than “oh good, they’ll know it’s me and my order won’t get too screwed up”. Before you know it, you’re buried beneath obligations, outstanding chores, dirty clothes and laundry, a stinky dog, a needy cat…and you’re still having to divert all your energy outside of your home, to the job that keeps your bills paid and provides you with the blessing of health insurance.
Life doesn’t stop. Obligations don’t dissipate, houses don’t clean themselves, blog posts don’t spontaneously appear. Look again at the illustration above. If you’re in the top row: be gracious and kind to yourself; it won’t be this way forever. It’s my experience that you’ll either learn to compensate or begin to recover; if you’re lucky, both. Hang in there, do what you can, and ask for help if/when you need it. If you’re in the bottom row: just be glad I made it to lunch. I say that jokingly…but also seriously. Be encouraging. Pretend you don’t notice I am wearing pajama bottoms. No, I didn’t shower before we met up…but please don’t take that personally – I woke up and decided that spending time with you was more important than freshly washed hair, and it really was an either/or that morning.
The Girl with the Glass Brain 