What’s something that’s true for the chronically tired but doesn’t get talked out loud often enough?
Success looks different for us.
Let me explain.
We all follow someone on social media who appears to slay their day with the ideal schedule, focus, and discipline. First, the nutriotnally complete meals, a workout, getting gains towards their goals, accomplishing after work routines. They talk about having a low energy day or a down day and tell you it’s ok to feel bad and to embrace the suck and things will look up soon. They talk about leaning into the hard while respecting having a low energy day like it’s a once a month phenomenon. They encourage you to relax, take a day off, recoup from your long holiday weekend. Then they get back into it.
But for the chronically tired, it looks different. We can’t measure our life by their standards. A holiday weekend doesn’t take one day to recover from, but usually a week. Same for a bad day or an emotional expereince. We’re losing weeks, not days. We’ve tried to control our energy through schedules and meals but can’t seem to crack the code; we often feel at the control of invisible powers that determine what sort of day we’ll be having regardless of our plans. Waking up, staying up, doing something physically active, preparing and eating the meals, while also managing other people (kids and spouses) and jobs, IS the goal–just being able to get through a day is our life goal.
For us, a low energy day or a day where our bodies feel like weighted lead moving through the space we’re in, IS the norm, and the day without it IS the exception.
We can’t keep up with the daily tasks of living and maintaining while ALSO adding in entreprenuerislship and career goals and life goals. The weight of carrying the inner energy to propel all of that while struggling to merely stay awake IS EXHAUSTING.
But we downplay who we are. We, in the mental health field, call it “gaslighting” ourselves. We try to keep up. We compare. We compete. We get distracted by everyone we’re scrolling past on our phones and their wonderful, productive lives. We judge and shame ourselves. And then we spiral into a self-induced sadness that eeps out our energy levels even more.
But what if being successful wasn’t a competition? What if it was measured differently for every person? What if your success makes the world better and so does mine? And they don’t have to be the same, and they shouldn’t be the same becuase then we’d have a very lopsided world.
What if you lived your day, and instead of judging what you got done you simply asked yourself, ” Is there something else I could handle right now?” and then you did it. And you kept asking yourself that until the answer was simply, “Now I sleep.” And each day, each week, you got a little more done on your life-long to do list without comparing it to someone else’s 24hrs.
What if? How would that change so many things for you?
As someone who works in a community with productive achievers, I know this struggle well.
It’s truly a challenge to see ourselves in a positive light when we believe there’s a whole world we need to keep up with.
