Dear Lord,
For all things I know I should be thankful. And I'm open to that, even in this case. I see how in Your incomprehensible love and brilliance You have turned my sins, some tough situations and my mental illness into a long setup for bearing fruit so sweet even I can taste it. I've had a lot of enemies in my life Lord, but this one has plagued me since I was a young child.
It's hard for me to talk about, even to You, who already knows everything. This aspect of myself makes me feel deeply ashamed, and I feel like I'm whining. But I'm genuinely at a loss, Lord. I don't know what to do. And I'm not even sure what it is or what to call it.
Jesus, you know how I struggled last week. That same struggle I've had with myself a lot of times. The last couple of weeks have been unusually busy, with extra irons in the fire. And from time to time in times like this I.......well.....I don't know what I do exactly. I know the symptoms though.
The main symptom is that I feel angst. Stultifying levels of angst. Angst to the point that I stop doing much of anything, except for eating. It seems like paralysis analysis, but.....maybe something a little more. Or maybe not. Holy Spirit, please enlighten me. What exactly is it that I was experiencing? Why did I get to that point?
I guess what may have caused it were particular to my two new projects. One of my new projects is a new position at work. But it wasn't so much my new position, but new circumstances in my old position which I'm transitioning out of. Last week I was sort of scrambling to get some things done before I go, all the while a couple of new things in that old position landed in my lap. It felt like the target kept moving away from me. A mildly irritating thing during normal times, but something that's just a fact of life which I'm generally quite used to, and I take in stride. So why did that get me so angsty?
I think it's also because I'm stepping into a new director of a new initiative in the volunteer organization I'm part of. That's on top of being a father and a husband. A husband of a wife who is also incredibly busy at work and typically spends more than 40hrs a week working, on top of being a mom and wife. This new directorship is, itself new, meaning that I'm the new director of something I need to build. This means I'm spending a lot of time outside of work hours doing other things which are timely, if not urgent, and they are at times nebulous, as in I'm not sure what goes into certain things. It also means I don't have extra time after hours to try to get my work done, all the while my goal posts at work keep moving away from me because I'm in transition meetings and because I'm having new tasks which are timely enough I'm the one who needs to handle them, not the guy replacing me.
Ok. Well that makes me feel better. BUT......it still doesn't explain how I could have prevented a lot of my angst. Not only was the angst itself highly unpleasant to deal with, it was self-fulfilling b/c it most definitely hindered my productivity at work, and after work. Over the last two days of the work week I probably lost 8 hours of work. That's much much too much.
Something I noticed too late was that the number of items in my daily planner grew beyond reasonable. Looking back to planner pages from a much darker period of my life, I used to do that often. My lists were unreasonable every day, and I remember feeling so overwhelmed. There are times where I have to work more hours than a standard 8 and 40, and that's fine from time to time. But even then there are hard limits on what I can even do. Even if I had unlimited hours, as someone who sits at a desk and has to focus a lot, I get to a point where my brain can no longer focus and I begin to make so many mistakes I run the risk of delivering a bad product and/or having to do a lot of rework later.