My Cup Runneth Over

For all you other enablers out there, Big Mommas and Big Daddies (if you remember transactional analysis), we have a problem. We are so busy being on call for the needs of our family and friends that we never seem to think to pour attention into our own selves. How many times have you joined a gym, started a diet, moved training equipment into your basement because you know you need to get fitter, but it seems impossible to focus for very long? Suddenly it has been days, or even weeks, since you thought about it? Other commitments got in the way - family, friends, and work commitments? There is never enough time in the day to please everyone you would like to please, and you are never ever on the top of that list.

People like us, people who sing harmony in the chorus of life, have had to either learn that there are lines we can't cross, or, by the third stage, we are pretty much all drunk up by other people's needs. I have tried to keep an oar in my own waters, so to speak, and set up habits like busing (I have to walk!) and carrying my lunch to work so that I don't go out for a nasty quick hot dog or forget to eat all together, but it has been a constant struggle my entire adult life to pay me more attention than that. Even the new business I have started only gets leftover hours and sometimes I forget I must prioritize it if I want it to succeed. Hell, sometimes I forget I started it!

I have the gift of hardy genes and I have about used them up molding my sleeping habits, my eating habits, and my priorities around my family. This pretty much means that for most of my life I have slept little, eaten a lot, and worn myself out at parties, ice rinks, and museums. That there is dangerously little elixer in the bottom of my cup becomes more obvious every time I throw another birthday party. They are beginning to throw me.

Almost all my friends see a masseuse or a chiropractor for body work, many with fewer resources than my own. And yet I can't even bring myself to get a professional haircut - way too easy to chop it off myself, and I don't need to spend the money on me. I don't need a pedicure when I can paint my own toes. I don't need a yoga class when I can stretch in my own bedroom. And I don't have the time to stop in a café to just watch the world, as I once loved to do. I am a busy lady.

It has taken years of self-talk about all that can be lost in this approach, of the likelihood of using it all up in the maze of the needs of others, but I may have finally turned into the corridor where I can clearly see myself at the other end. At the end near the exit.

I see myself using my gym as a spa, loving the steam bath, reserving the massage table. I see myself doing this regularly and happily, and if not without fail, then often enough to call it habit. I see myself stretching my old bones apart as part of my nighty-night routine, and I see that routine happening earlier and the following sleep becoming longer. I see myself eating enough less to lighten the load all that arthritis in my foot is carrying. (I see myself LOVING that as I put on a tight sweater.)

Because I have found the right metaphor for us, the enablers. All those symbols and aphorisms and illustrations that have gone before have not meant enough, but this one does.  You cannot pour from an empty cup. 

And now, I am all about learning to refill.