Now, bear in mind, when I say “emotional breakdown” I’m not talking about a “call the men in white coats” sort of breakdown.   I mean that my emotions broke loose like a herd of bouncing, rampaging lambs who’ve discovered a hole in the fence and immediately gotten all hopped up on the high-fructose berries that were previously just out of reach.  

I’ll pause just a moment while you enjoy the mental cartoon that image probably provoked. 

I hate it when that happens.  I wish I could be all calm, cool, and zen all the time.  But the fact of the matter is, I’m not naturally calm, cool or zen.  I’m an enneagram 4 (**cough**drama queen **cough**), an INFP, and you don’t even want to know how high I scored on the in-book test for The Highly Sensitive Person.    

But the thing is, none of this is new information to me.  Not only are the peculiar quirks of my particular mind-body combination not exactly a newsflash, I also have spent a ridiculous amount of time over the last 10 years learning the best tools for managing life as a somewhat neurotic, sensitive, emotionally-centered person.  

I’m just not using any of those tools at the present.  

I’m not calm, cool or zen as much as I could be lately, because quite frankly, I’m insisting on acting as though I’m a naturally extraverted, thick-skinned tough chick.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m considerably tougher and more extraverted than I once was.  The person I was 5 or 10 years ago would be crying under her desk daily in a little ball of stress-induced hysteria if she found herself magically transported to my present life.  

Going to do that “transparent, authentic blogger” thing and admit I’ve taken medication in the past to help deal with anxiety and cyclical depression.  But what that experience mainly taught me is that I actually do much better when I manage those things through proper diet, exercise and self-care than with drugs.  

It’s much like diabetes or high blood pressure.  There are folks who absolutely have to be on medication.  Then there are folks who can manage their health issues in a more holistic and natural way.

But you have to actually DO it.  You can’t just stop taking medicine and NOT change the things you need to change.  Which is what I’ve been doing.  This is in part because I absolutely hate the idea of being “high maintenance.”  I’ve heard those words, along with “sensitive” and “emotional,” thrown at me like a verbal hand-grenade full of character flaws.  Perfect people aren’t high maintenance.  

So I spent a large chunk of my life trying to prove I was “low maintenance.”  

Which, evidently means “a doormat.”  Which made all the people around me much happier–most of the time.  Except for those moments when the stress built up to a point where I had a major meltdown.

Last week’s meltdown was a minor thing compared to the ones I’ve had in the past.  Which prompts a few different reflections.  First, gratitude that I no longer let things deteriorate the way I once did.  Second, a wake-up call that I need to stop acting like I’m “low maintenance” and spend some energy maintaining my good health and wellbeing.  I need to do the things I know I need to do, and stop making excuses that I’m too busy to care for myself properly.  

I read once that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it.  

So that’s what I’m going to do.  Moving forward, I’ll be adding a new post every week to “The Juggling Act” category in a series about self-care for sensitive people.  I’m going to be resuming some good habits I’ve let fall by the wayside, and share some helpful “Sensitive Person Lifehacks” with my reader friends here.  I hope you like it–and if you’re a “sensitive person” of some stripe and want to share your own struggles and insights, you’re welcome to chime in on the comments.

I stopped having fun.

Ironically, somewhere in the last year or so, just as I found myself in the admittedly enviable position of being able to do what I really enjoy for a living, I stopped enjoying it.  I was so darned determined to prove to people that I’m good at what I do, I turned what should have been a calling into a “job.”

When you’re in your calling, what you feel should mostly be joy.  Something about the work connects with something deep inside you.  You’re doing what you were made to do, and that should feel good.  And I know this because I have felt that over the last year or so.  But for the last few months, it was becoming less frequent, just as the progression of events in my vocational life should have made it more often.

I’m not saying you don’t have aggravations and frustrations when you’re working in your calling.  There will always be jerks, and weenies, and infuriating technical snafus.  But I wasn’t enjoying the work itself.  It had become labor.

I did a little etymological research.  The root for the word “work” is related to “activity” and “accomplishment.”  “Vocation” comes from the root word for “voice”–meaning something is calling to you; which is why “vocation” and “calling” are such close synonyms.  “Labor,” however, comes from a root word that means “totter, slip, or sleep.”

When you’re awake to your calling, your work does give you a sense of accomplishment.  You feel that you’re getting somewhere, that you’re completing your opus, or at least contributing to it.  But when you’re slipping out of touch with your soul, your deep inner self, you totter into labor, and you lose consciousness of why you’re putting forth that effort.

Okay, enough with the big words and the heavy stuff. That’s not the main point of this post.

Have I ever told you the story of how I got involved in social media, online communities, and blogging in the first place?  No?  Maybe elsewhere?  It’s an interesting story, that.  I’ll probably share it here soon.

At any rate, there was a time when talking with other folks online, getting to know them and letting them get to know me, was fun.  Sharing stories and hearing what people had to say about them was fun.  Figuring out how to write a title so that people absopositivenlutely had to click on it and read the post, was fun.    Learning and teaching and mentoring and being mentored online was fun.

And then, sometime after I started getting paid to do those things, I think the guilt hit.  I love my parents and grandparents, but quite frankly, growing up I got the very strong impression that work was supposed to be a miserable, hard, difficult thing.  If it wasn’t, you probably weren’t doing it right.  Or, more to the point, if it wasn’t, you were probably not putting in a hard day’s work.  This meant you were, as my granny would say, a hippie.  Or just plain lazy. Let’s just say my elders did not really grok Csizsentmihaly’s concept of flow.

I also have a large number of loved ones who would very much like to be doing something they really enjoyed for a living.   As much as they’ve tried to be happy for me as my vocational life kept getting better, I can’t help but feel an undercurrent of envy.  Whether it’s a true reflection of their feelings or not, I kept imagining them thinking “What on earth did she do to deserve this?”  So anyway.  Guilt.  Lotta guilt.

I started trying to make my work seem more like, well, work.  I got deadly flipping serious.  About everything.  I lost the playfulness, sense of exploration and lighthearted curiosity that made this work my métier in the first place.

Part of this is a function of my personality type.  When I’m in a healthy place, my humor and idealism shine through.  When I’m in a less-healthy spot, I get increasingly “heavy” (metaphorically, spiritually and physically–I gain weight when I’m down).

So this week, I’m resolving to unload the guilt, recapture my joy and start having fun again.  Online.  Offline.  At work.  In my marriage.  With my kids.  With my other relationships.

Because truthfully, that’s the only way I can be really good at any of those things.

img courtesy simmbarb on sxc.hu