I’ll be honest, most of my life fear has played a big role in my choices, and my life. Fear has good intentions and all, but let’s face it, 99.9% of the decisions I make are not life-or-death decisions and I don’t really need fear to survive.
At the beginning of the year I decided this was the year I was going to live fearlessly, or at the very least fear-less-ly. I’ve made several fearless choices, such as resigning a job at which I was burned out despite not having another job lined up yet, and accepting a part-time job to improve my work-life balance. So far this year I’ve been telling my fear to suck it! Until last week.
Last week I found myself in over my head. Taking on more than I can handle seemed like a perfectly good topic for a blog post, complete with tips on how to handle this precarious situation. I came up with specific tips to address the situation and I did exactly none of them. My attempts to be superwoman even though I know I’m not superwoman resulted in me getting sick. Still I soldiered on, of course making myself even sicker- sick to the point I found myself choking back tears of exhaustion and frustration.
When I realized I had made choice after choice that made me sicker and sicker I knew I had to come clean with myself and the world. The reason I didn’t take the advice I shared in my blog post was because I let my fear get the better of me.
Image courtesy of F.C. Photography
Fear that setting boundaries would make others think I’m unreasonable. Fear that putting my health first would indicate I’m not capable or reliable. Fear that I would disappoint someone out there somewhere, and somehow that disappointment would lead to- to what I’m not really sure, but I was sure it was going to be bad.
Only it wasn’t. And none of those fears were thoughtful, honest, inspiring, necessary, or kind. None of those fears were real.
So here I am, admitting to myself and the world that despite writing a work-life balance blog, sometimes I stumble. I guess the good thing about stumbling is it reminds me all over again what is and isn’t important in life. Living an awesome balanced life – important. Pretty much everything else is not really that important when it comes down to it.
