“Self-compassion involves wanting health and well-being for oneself and leads to proactive behavior to better one’s situation, rather than passivity. And self-compassion doesn’t mean that I think my problems are more important than yours, it just means I think that my problems are also important and worthy of being attended to.” -Kristin Neff
I missed one of my very favorite Torah portions this week, Vayeitzei. This is the portion which gives us Jacob’s ladder. A big theme I always pull from that portion is the distance that is always there between God and us. That there can be as much distance or as little as we create.
Creating space is not necessarily a bad thing. Just as a toddler runs away from her parents and looks back, so do we run away from the Divine on occasion just to stretch our legs. At a certain point, we are either run alongside God or away from God.
Regardless, with my week off from Torah study I’ve had some self directed reflection.
Since it is officially the last month of 2019, I’ve been thinking a lot about my year and what went well and what didn’t. I’ve been wrestling with this one thing that I didn’t have a name for until I (embarrassingly) typed the following question into google:
“What is it when you have too many friends to be a good friend to any of them?”
I have a lot of people in my life who I hold varying amounts of space for, and I feel like I’m getting worse and worse at it. I can’t tell if it’s the demands of my job or if life just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Babies, deaths, job promotions, job losses, moves, parties, weddings…all of these things happened and I find myself getting more and more anxious in keeping track and tabs on all of the amazing people in my life.
I literally can’t. And what’s more, I’ve found that I’ve been working so hard on holding all of those things in my arms that I don’t have as much time for my own things.
What that looks like is instead of reaching out to see my friends on my days off, I hunker down. I isolate in my home. I do things with the intention of restoring some kind of emotional energy that I can’t readily name. I am fatigued in a deep, central, core way.
What I found when I entered that Google was a concept called “role strain.”
I was able to read this article from Elle written by Julia Sonenshein, which echoed many of these sensations I was experiencing. She writes,
“I felt drained all the time. Having six or seven close friends was like making a bunch of promises I couldn’t keep, and I agonized over not being able to provide enough emotional energy to everyone. I clearly remember the night that two close friends went through awful breakups and I couldn’t be in both places at once.”
While some of the examples that Sonenshein seem vapid, like trying to arrange a bunch for 10 girlfriends, her general experience is relatable to mine.
What is interesting about role strain is that it doesn’t require you to fill a million different roles. I think the stereotypical understanding of the over-extended woman is one who fills multiple roles (think: wife, mom, career, PTA president, etc). There is some tension between the roles of my life. Like, when my temple needs me at a meeting on a day I have something at work, or when my niece wants me to go to her birthday dinner but I’m with a friend who needs some company. For me, my major roles are daughter, sister, aunt, dog mom, friend, student, educator, bedside nurse, and congregant at my temple in various lay-person roles. When those roles get in each other’s way, that’s role conflict.
However, my biggest issue is not role conflict. There’s some of that, but really I feel like I balance those roles OK. My bigger issue is just the role strain. At any given time I am overextended at work and overextended with my friends.
At work, my job necessitates a certain level of investment in my coworkers. I am in charge of their development as nursing professionals. So when one of my coworkers fails, or doesn’t get into school, or suffers an unexpected loss at the bedside, or wants support on a project that I can’t give, or tells me they’re burned out…. I grieve. I feel it deep. Take that emotional energy and multiply it times 20 when it’s someone in orientation. It’s devastating. It is my professional responsibility to care for these people. People who show up to care for others for 40 hours a week. It’s overwhelming.
When my people outside of work are having big moments (both celebrations and mournings), I find that I have less room than ever before to be nurturing to them. I can’t tell if it’s the scale of the issues that has gotten bigger or just the number of people. I think it’s natural to accumulate friends as we move through life. At this point in my life I have friends stretching back to middle school. That’s twenty years of friendships. What’s funny is that my life has been without traditional milestones, so my friends haven’t had the same call-to-service that I often have had for them. I have not had the weddings, the births, the deaths that rally the troops. People don’t create meal-trains for tough semesters in grad school or 60 hour work weeks. Nobody throws you a shower for adopting a new dog or holds a funeral for losing your last one.
If I sound bitter, I don’t think I am. I only say this all to explain that I have become aware that I overextended myself energetically for a while now and my heart and body are letting me know.
It’s not going to be perfect. I am going to continue to let people down or fail to meet their needs. What I have to trust is that I am but one of many people who are there for support. Nobody expects us to show up 100 percent of the time. I would never ask that of them, so why expect it of myself?
Kristin Neff speaks to this concept in her book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. She states
“If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation.”
I feel this deeply. It’s time to turn in and be kind to myself. To be completely frank, if I keep resisting it’s only going to get harder.
I’m not sure of how to change or what to change. What I know is that there is a name for this sensation that bathes me many times a week. What I know is that I may not be there for everything, but I will do my best to show up when I am there. To really spiritually and energetically show up.
In peace,
C.
And You Shall Love 