Severe

Yesterday was another day that began in exhaustion and ended in some rather severe self-doubt.  There's a voice in my head that says it's been a month/year/lifetime of severe self-doubt.

This morning, as I felt that spiral tighten again, I said out loud, "You have always been too hard on yourself."  I paused and said, "And you're being too hard on yourself right now."  I laughed at the sharp tone of voice that I took with myself.

When I am operating out of a place of exhaustion, it's much easier to be much harder on myself.  Yesterday was the kind of day when I would put a few things away and then have to sit for awhile to regroup.  Usually, life isn't this hard for me, but yesterday it was.

It's amazing how many things there are to put away after an accreditation visit.  Most of my faculty files had been taken out of bins and left in unalphabetized piles.  The hanging file folders themselves had also been removed.  

I suspect that I will spend the next few months finding piles of paper that I stashed in drawers in a last hour effort to clean the surfaces of my office, so as to be presentable to visitors.  Most of that paper will go to the recycling or shredding bin.  But in the last hour effort, I didn't have time to sort in that way.  I hung onto many piles just in case we were ordered to redo the binders and files.  Now I need to remember that most of those piles won't be important in the months to come.

Hours later:

I started writing and then got sidetracked by taking a walk and grocery shopping.  Grrrrr.  

Let me remember to be gentle with myself.  Just because everyone else has jumped right back into pre-accreditation life doesn't mean that I can do that too.  They can do that because they didn't have to use so much of their time and energy getting ready.

Let me remember that I am actually accomplishing more than I feel like I'm accomplishing.  And this week-end, I'll make sure to take some time to get some baking done, some writing done, some visioning done.  I can hang on a bit longer.