When Life is Overwhelming: 6 Self-Care Strategies

As I write this, it’s only Wednesday night…and already it’s been a week.

I feel spent, drained, and done.

A synopsis of the highlights: parent email that launched a personal and professional attack at me, my own children behaving with abhorrent manners in public (I raised you better than that!), a sick toddler up for two nights in a row miserable with a fever, unexpected car and computer repairs that drained my bank account, and deep, crippling grief creeping up on me out of nowhere several years after my father’s death.

All in the last 4 days. 

When it rains, it pours, right?

So this week’s post is not going to be on classroom tips, but rather acknowledging the fact that teachers are people. And while being around so many kids daily might give us immune systems of steel against most common viruses, we are not immune to the ups and downs of life, just like everybody else. 

Let’s talk about the times when life gets hard: how to give yourself some grace, patience, and kindness.

High Standards: Give Yourself some Grace

Last week’s post was about the importance of maintaining high standards for students. As someone with a personality that leans heavily toward Type A, I’ve always held myself to a very high standard in a variety of ways, which is sometimes beneficial (like maintaining a high GPA, developing high-quality curriculum for my students, or teaching myself to build this website from scratch and start a blog…) but other times has been to my detriment (like the very REAL experience of MOM GUILT, or like back in that early blog post about being a control freak…)

Over time, life has taught me that there are times to stick doggedly to that high standard for yourself, and there are times to give yourself some grace. Give yourself permission to be HUMAN…shortcomings, failures, weaknesses and all.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you are not perfect. And that’s OK.

Don’t Be Gatsby

How good are you at accepting reality, and being at peace with it? Your own inner peace will directly correlate to this. I found this great article from Psychology Today that has so many nuggets on the topic of acceptance and peace. Here’s one:

“The more difficulty life delivers, the more unpredictability and impermanence, the tighter we grip onto what we know, what we have, an imaginary safety and permanence. We cling to an idea of what we had and what we’re losing. The more flexibility life demands, the more rigid we become, and the more we suffer. When life throws us curveballs, or balls that hit us smack in the knee, we suffer not only from the pain of our smashed kneecap, but equally (if not more), from the thought that this shouldn’t be happening to us. We “shouldn’t” get hit in the knee, we don’t deserve that, this is not the life we signed up for. We get stuck in the idea of what our life “should” look like—which, for sure, is not this. We fight against reality, a reality, by the way, that has no interest in our protestations.”

~Nancy Colier

This reminds me of another time of extreme personal difficulty in my past when a teacher friend gave me the same basic advice. I was going through a terrible divorce at the time, and for months I was so confused and disoriented at what was happening in my life that most days it was difficult to tell which way was up. 

One day she and I were sitting together during hall duty and I was telling her about the whole situation, and really lamenting the discrepancy of the reality of the situation vs what I wished the reality would be. We were both teaching the novel The Great Gatsby (one of my favorites). In it, the title character spends his entire adult life chasing after the illusion of the way he wishes life would be instead of accepting the reality of his life, and eventually, he dies because of that relentless pursuit. 

My friend looked at me, and with her trademark wit and no-BS style, said something I’ve never forgotten: “Sometimes, you’ve just gotta look at yourself, and say, ‘&!#@, I’m Gatsby!’ ” 

Her point was the same: to be at peace in a situation, accept the reality of the situation. Then you can be more clear-headed about how to move ahead. And most times, that involves acknowledging our own human-ness. 

Kill Your Pride: Accept the Love and Support You Need

On Wednesday night, after a sudden wave of old grief engulfed me in a way it hadn’t in years, I was ugly-crying in the church bathroom stall wondering how I was going to make myself halfway presentable to emerge from it.

And then I reminded myself that the only way through grief is THROUGH it.

Trying to side-step or bury it never works, and does more harm than good. So I let myself cry. Bending over, tears on the floor, shoulders shaking: I let it happen. And then at the sink, trying to wash the red from my face with cold water, I was reminded of God’s grace in the form of an acquaintance I had only spoken with in passing: she happened to come into the bathroom just at that moment. She of course asked what was wrong, and instead of dismissing it or clamming up because I don’t know her that well, I told her the truth. And I was blessed for it: she loved me and showed me the tenderness of a sister I’d known all my life. She shared with me her own knowledge of pain and loss: of multiple family members whose deaths she’d never had closure for. The love and care in her eyes and her embrace were so genuine. She hugged me, prayed for me, and loved on me. 

Then, as I walked through the lobby, I was intercepted by a friend who saw me and asked, “Are you ok?”

And I said what 99% of us are programmed to say: “I’m fine.”

And she replied the way that real friends do: “NO, you’re not,” and ushered me away to talk and pray with her and her mom, (also a dear friend), and they loved on me some more.

So here’s the take away: Let yourself be vulnerable. The world is filled with people pretending to be something they’re not: YOU be REAL. When you need to cry, do it. The world will not crash down if you don’t hold it up. (Hint: it was never you holding it up in the first place!)

And when you need a shoulder to cry on, accept the one that is offered to you, and just be thankful for it. We all have seasons of being the takers and the givers: sometimes we need to take the grace and kindness of other people, and sometimes we are the strong ones who can give that to others. People are put into our lives for a reason; I firmly believe this. Embrace your current season. A new one is on its way.

“Mama said there’d be days like this”

As teachers, we are expected to be role models both in and outside of school. We are expected to have all the answers, know what to do in every situation (multiply that expectation if you’re a parent)…and a lot of the time, we do a pretty good job! But there is a danger of expecting TOO much perfection of yourself, or of having unrealistic expectations. 

Everyone has bad days where their teaching game is just “off.”

Everyone has days where the lesson totally flops.

Everyone has days where something wild happens with the students and the best you can do is keep them in one piece to return home that day. 

Everyone has days where the stress and pressure of your personal life just creeps in and you simply can’t keep your teacher face on. I had this happen in November of my very first year teaching: I was 23 years old and a friend I’d known since age 3 (she was more like my sister) died at age 26 of Leukemia.

It was the first time I had experienced the death of someone very close to me. I foolishly tried to go to work that day. I remember standing at the front of the room, trying SO hard to focus my cloudy brain on ANYTHING academic…and it was taking everything I had just to prevent myself from breaking down in front of my whole class. Just at that moment, a colleague walked by my classroom and I guess she must have seen the look on my face. She came in and asked if I was alright…

Well, you know that when you’re NOT alright, those are often the magic words that just open the floodgates…I lost it. I held up a folder in front of my face to block it from my students (silly; obviously they could see I was crying…) and just cried and explained to my friend between sobs. She, being older and wiser, said: “WHY are you at work?!” and ushered me out of the room. She directed me to go home immediately and she would take care of everything with my class.

She told me what I’m telling you: It’s OK to not be OK ALL the time. You NEED to give yourself the time and space to heal. 

Schedule your own White Spaces

Too often in our busy, busy, BUSY lives we are stretched to the max, filling every conceivable white space on the calendar.

I know this because it’s how I’ve operated for most of my life. It’s something I’m still working on.

In fact, I’ll admit that I have taken a certain personal pleasure or sense of pride in being able to successfully “tetris” my life calendar together in such a way that it all works: juggling ALL the balls without dropping any.

But what I’ve learned after years and YEARS of living that way is that it will burn you out. 

I’ve always been a scheduler; I remember it starting in high school. So if you’re like me and feel somehow negligent if you’re NOT scheduling every available hour in the day, here’s a hack: SCHEDULE the white space to BE BLANK.

You NEED that white space. I NEED that white space.

I NEED that BREATHING SPACE. You NEED that BREATHING space.

My husband and I recently started doing this to balance out our busy lives: we noticed that work, kids, couple, and self time were consistently unbalanced in our lives and it was starting to take its toll. So we began scheduling a 10 minute meeting together once a week to look at the coming week and pre-schedule our evenings for each night: family time, us time, self time, work time. We now run the calendar instead of the calendar running us: we are still very busy (always will be with a family of 6), but now we are less frantic and hectic. We’ve got a better balance.

This Too, Shall Pass

If you’ve had a rough week (or few days) like me, don’t forget: This too, shall pass.

Life is not all valleys just like it’s not all mountains; notice that one can’t exist without the other. The light and dark times in our lives are balanced to the extent we allow them to be.

On the difficult days, take that extra time to be tender with yourself: nurture yourself. Decompress. Breathe. Schedule some you time on the calendar; you can’t pour out of an empty cup.