Originally written and published on 08/06/2019
It wasn’t that long ago that I wore my ‘busyness’ as a badge of honour. The importance of being able to say to someone ‘how busy I was’. As if that made me so very important. It’s source was, at that time, work. How I actually was juggling more balls than Tweedy in Gifford Circus! Also, like Tweedy, dropping some as I went along.
After having been made redundant in March 2016 – overnight I was no longer busy. Oh my, I didn’t like it at all. I had been so conditioned since school and straight into work – for 22 years I had been ‘busy’! As much as I wanted to be busy, the universe had other plans for me. I can now see that I was given the gift to heal my fight or flight response. 2 ½ years on I feel like a different person, I have had time to re-learn who Caroline is, what makes me happy, to create boundaries that are healthy for me…every day for me is a school day where I get to learn and heal. I will never be fully healed and I will never learn everything that I want to learn; but today is a good day to continue on this new path.
Yes, the fear of not being busy enough still creeps in, there are days when I feed it, but mostly I drop kick it out of my day.
I have learnt that being busy isn’t a badge of honour. Productivity isn’t the only thing that makes me fulfilled. I am worth more than how productive I was today. We are all worth more than how productive we have been today.
I had used external things to make me feel worthy, in this approach, worthiness had become dependent on constantly chasing the next best thing, but never really attaining anything. Constantly looking at ways to feel good enough, whilst at the same time struggling with low self-esteem, low confidence and low self-worth.
I realised that for me, busyness, chaos and goal chasing was a way that I was avoiding of just sitting and feeling. Of being completely and utterly vulnerable. Busyness was helping me to avoid the storm that was swirling around me. It was helping me to avoid making any major life decisions. It was helping me to avoid being honest about how bad I was feeling about myself and my situation. It became easier to focus on tasks, projects, relationships, degrees, jobs and hustling…all because I was not ready to face that ‘thing’.
You alone are enough, you have nothing to prove to anyone – Maya Angelou