Apparently, This Was My Week to Practice Deep Breathing

You know those weeks when Friday finally arrives and you look back and think, What the hell just happened? That was this week. Except technically, it wasn’t even a whole week. Monday was Labor Day, so we managed to cram an impressive amount of chaos into just four days. Apparently, we are overachievers. LOL.

Tuesday started with having a Zio Monitor put on to keep track of what my heart is doing. Seems important to mention considering what happened over the next few days. By Tuesday afternoon, someone was at my house pulling up a large portion of my living room carpet so we could deal with a pet urine odor that I have been determined to get rid of. She worked on it for hours, and then came the drying machine. The FRICKING drying machine. That thing ran and ran and ran. So there I was with a heart monitor stuck to my chest, half my living room carpet pulled up and what sounded like a small jet engine running inside my house. And it was only Tuesday.

Wednesday morning, however, I got a break. I met my childhood friend for coffee, and you know what? I needed it. For a little while, I wasn’t thinking about work or carpet or smells or machines or anything that needed to be fixed. I was sitting across from someone I’ve known most of my life, drinking coffee, talking and just enjoying being there. Then I went home. Back to the carpet, back to the work being done, and back to that fricking machine. LOL.

By Thursday, apparently I hadn’t created quite enough chaos for myself, so I decided it was the perfect time to rearrange my office. In my defense, I had a legitimate reason. Every morning the sun comes blazing through my office window at just the right angle to scorch my corneas while I’m trying to work. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but seriously, I couldn’t see my computer screen half the time. So I decided I needed to move my desk. Simple enough, right?

Except apparently I am incapable of just moving a desk. Moving the desk turned into moving other furniture, which turned into reorganizing, which turned into decluttering, which turned into boxes and bins and piles everywhere. My office looked like it had exploded. You know that point in an organizing project when you stand in the middle of the room, look around and think, I have made a terrible mistake? Yeah. That.

But I kept going, and then 4:30 happened.

That’s about the time things went to hell in a handbasket with one of our work events. I wasn’t actually at the event, but believe me, that did not prevent the stress from reaching me. There had been a misunderstanding involving some RC boats. We thought they had been canceled. They had not. Suddenly I’m digging through emails trying to figure out exactly what happened and doing whatever I could to help while everyone else was scrambling to fix the situation. Messages were flying, people were stressed, replacement boats had to be found, problems continued throughout the night, and everyone’s stress level went from zero to approximately 4,782 in about five minutes.

Meanwhile, remember that Zio Monitor I had put on Tuesday? Yeah. Still there. Quietly recording away. I can only imagine what it thought of Thursday afternoon. LOL.

Then came Friday. Nothing catastrophic happened Friday. It was just…off. You know how after something really stressful happens, the actual crisis may be over but the stress doesn’t immediately leave the room? That was Friday. Everyone was still feeling it. The mood was off, people were tired, and I was tired. Then suddenly I had four event proposals to put together because apparently the universe looked at the previous three days and thought, You know what Terri needs? A deadline.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, though, I realized I was doing something I’ve been trying to get better at. I was breathing. Really breathing. There were moments when I could feel myself getting wound up, and I would stop and deliberately take a slow breath in and a slow breath out. Then I’d do it again.

It sounds ridiculously simple, but it worked. It didn’t make the drying machine shut up. It didn’t put my office back together. It didn’t fix the event problem, and it certainly didn’t make those four proposals magically create themselves, although THAT would have been a fantastic breathing exercise. What it did was change what was happening inside of me.

I’ve spent a lot of years learning about codependency, boundaries, letting go and understanding what belongs to me and what doesn’t. Apparently, sometimes you get a four-day pop quiz. When everyone around me is stressed, my natural tendency is to feel it too. I want to help. I want to fix it. I want everybody to be okay. But I’m learning that I can care about what someone else is going through without carrying all of their stress inside my own body.

I can help dig through emails. I can care about how everyone involved is feeling. I can do my part to help fix a problem. But I don’t have to physically carry everyone’s panic with me, especially while I’m literally wearing a monitor that is recording what my heart is doing. There’s some irony for you.

Maybe that’s why getting organized has felt so important to me lately too. Sometimes when life feels chaotic, doing one small thing that I can control helps. I can move the desk. I can clean out a drawer. I can get rid of something I don’t need (okay, a lot of things I don’t need). I can make a little more room. And when I feel myself getting overwhelmed, I can stop and take a deep breath.

The goal isn’t to suddenly have everything under control, because if this week proved anything, it’s that sometimes you absolutely do not. Maybe the goal is simply learning how to stay grounded when everything around you isn’t.

So yes, it was a week. Actually, it was FOUR DAYS. One Zio Monitor, one living room carpet pulled apart, one fricking drying machine, coffee with an old friend, one office that looked like a bomb went off in it, one event that went to hell in a handbasket, four proposals and a whole lot of deep breathing.

I’m calling it a win that we all made it to Friday. LOL.

Sometimes Journeying On Strong looks like making progress, feeling centered and having your shit together. And sometimes it looks like standing in the middle of an absolute mess, taking a deep breath and asking yourself, Okay. What’s the next thing I can do?

This week, that was enough.

Journey on strong.