You’ve been there. Maybe you’re even there right now:
– You’re tired and depleted
– You have a heavy heart
– And you’re out of ideas
Your creativity which once was bubbling over seems to have gone dry and you miss it. You feel like you should be doing more. You’re judging yourself for not being as creative as you were in the past.
I sit in front of my computer screen. I stare at the blank word document. I check Facebook. I check my email. I scroll through twitter until I make my way to tweets I’ve already read.
I go back to the word document. My stomach sinks. Where do I start? How can I do this? My palms sweat. I go back to Facebook and watch a video of a cute hedgehog eating food that my friend has posted. I feel better. I look for more cute videos to watch.
“I don’t know how to answer. I wish there was something to reveal, some horrible secret about my childhood so we would have our explanation and they could feel sorry for me. I wish someone had hurt me so I could say, This is why. But I’ve never had an excuse for being me.”
-Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior
Glennon is standing in front of her parents trying to explain her bulimia and alcoholism. And when I read the words I feel the same way. I’ve never had an excuse for being me either.
I am not a bulimic or an alcoholic but I wish I had a way to explain my anxiety.
My breath is short. I am trying to get enough air. I am panicking.
I want to go to back to school badly but when I see the price of the plane ticket, I feel like I can’t breathe. How will I afford this 5 times a year? Will I go into debt? Will I ever be able to get out? Will I ever be able to start saving for retirement? Will I end up alone, desolate, broke on the street?
Last month I spent a week on the North channel of Lake Huron with 85 family members and old friends. By day three, I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. I’ve gotten more introverted as I’ve gotten older. I couldn’t deal with the number of social interactions.
I was upset. This was suppose to be my vacation. This was suppose to be relaxing and reinvigorating. I felt drained and felt like it was the extroverts fault. Why were they subjecting me to this? I felt like they were predators that pounced when I wasn’t expecting it. I felt like they were vampires that sucked me dry. I felt brittle, withered, helpless.
Photo credit: Airwolfhound (CC: some rights reserved)
Last night my imagination started to take off. I heard a large truck and my mind started telling the story of what if it’s a plane and it’s doing an emergency landing here because it’s had some sort of failure. My breath quickened. I started to panic.
What should I do? Who should I call? Emergency!
EVERYDAY COURAGE: Sarah Archibald cares about food. She cares about hunger. And she wants to be a part of creating a food system that is just for both farmers and the low income who sometimes can’t access it.
She works for the Meal Exchange, an organization that engages students to think about and transform their local food systems. And she has been thinking about and working towards better food systems since she was a teenager.
Sarah came over to my apartment for dinner last week. We ate frittata and roasted sweet potatoes and our conversation wove from privilege to self care to music. In our chat I was most interested in how Sarah had known for so long that a just food system was what she wanted to spend her life working towards.
It was so fun and inspiring for both of us, we decided to post the conversation as a podcast. Click here to listen into the first episode of the Everyday Courage podcast!
Continue reading “The Best Advice I Ever Got Was Questions with Sarah Archibald”
