Talk About it Tuesday - Forgiving Yourself

 

Picture it:  You have a huge To Do list and by the end of the day, only half of it is checked off

Or

You have company coming and your house is a mess.  You aren't able to get everything cleaned up in time, and every crumb at the baseboard is laughing at you.

Or

You let your kid stay home because getting out of bed to take them to school is more trouble than you can deal with.

Every single one of these is something I deal with.  (Though not as much on the last one.)  I want everything around me to be perfect - a perfect apartment, perfect cleaning job, being the perfect wife and perfect mother.  Being the perfect friend.  I don't expect this perfection from anyone else.  If Rich can't get to helping me by cleaning the kitchen, I don't (usually) get mad, especially if he's had a hard, busy day.  If Pete gets 90% of the living room cleaned before his attention wears out, I count that as a positive and let him do more the next day.  If a friend isn't able to meet me for coffee because their day got busier than they'd expected, I am disappointed but I understand.  They are all allowed to be imperfect beings.  But I'm not.  I should be able to handle it all.

Now, please don't think I have anyone else telling me that I have to be perfect.  In fact, Rich tells me more often than not that I need to go sit down, that I've done enough.  He reminds me that if I push myself too much one day, I won't have the body to do anything the next.  But there's always a niggling part of me that knows I'll be letting people down if I don't get X,Y,Z done.

I'm trying to learn to forgive myself when I don't have enough spoons to accomplish everything I plan to do in one day.  Part of that is keeping up my Today I... notebook so the little things that so often get done, things like taking my meds, showering, brushing my teeth, will still show me that I did do SOMETHING and it was something important.  There are days that I need that to look back on, to remind myself that I regularly get a lot more done than my depression will let me remember.  

Many times, on FB (or in real life), I will proudly crow that I did "the thing!"  A lot of times, it's something small and many people would wonder why I'm talking about THAT.  But it's another way to remind myself that I did something that was either scary or difficult for me (see: making phone calls, cleaning the house).  Luckily, my friends and family generally understand that that is what this is.  The hard part, of course, is forgiving myself when I do make those posts and declarations because I have to remember that I'm trying to build myself up more than boast.

I know that all of this - the need for "perfection", the need to apologize when I didn't do anything wrong (yep, that's a big one of mine), are all part and parcel of my depression.  I have difficulty, in the midst of it, remembering that I can take days to myself as long as I don't let myself wallow for weeks.  And it's something I am trying to change for my own mental wellbeing.

You can see the imperfect clutter around (though the picture was more about how my SPDer was watching something on his phone).

A reminder to myself that I need to focus on.  And more background clutter.