This week was a push week. I pushed to get the last calendar pre-orders out. I pushed to do the regular shipping. I pushed to organize all the scout things. I pushed to help Patch with his big assignment. I pushed to help Kiki with her massive, must-not-fail, picture book project. All of that on top of pushing for things all the week before. I was not sleeping enough. And anxiety re-emerged to make many tasks less easily accomplished.
I could tell I was fatigued because of the little things like the increase of typos in my text messages, emails, and blog entries. The available cooking ingredients in our house dwindled to canned goods because I kept failing to go to the store despite my intentions to do so. I was late picking up kids. It took me four days to get a plane flight booked because I kept forgetting to sit down and do it. Email stacked up so that my inbox overflowed and I kept discovering that I’d composed email answers in my head, but not actually sent them. My brain was trying to track too many things and lost track of some of them.
In years past I got very stressed about this creeping unreliability. I’ve come to accept it as part of the holiday shipping season. Not only do I accept it, but I let people around me know to expect it. I get flaky between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t want to be, but I’ve had to learn that I am. There is just too much going on. I push too hard on too many things. I short myself on sleep trying to get them done. Even attempting to normalize my sleep becomes another thing to manage. So I just muddle through, prioritizing each day to make sure that none of the critical things get dropped.
Until I hit a day like today. All the big things for the week are finished. I pushed hard. I didn’t miss the important things. I am tired, but there is no time for me to drift and recover. I’ve already got ten more things lined up waiting for me to push and accomplish them. I want to drift and there is no time for it. Time available or not, I’ve done a fair amount of drifting today. I ran out of push.