Overwhelmed by overwhelm?

The past 24 hours have been kind of nuts. Just one of those days where everything happens at once and new things come up and you need to re-evaluate because where you thought you were going has disappeared and you need to formulate a new plan. Cool. I’m down with the doing things – I made 8 billion phone calls, 5 appointments in 4 days etc.

But as I go along I start to panic. I get more and more frazzled because there is just so much to do and it’s all changing and ahhh!

Now none of these new changes are bad – in fact, they’re all good. They’re just happening quickly. (Which, as Jesse aptly pointed out, is pretty much the only way we do things. If it’s not radical and ridiculous, we’re probably not going to be very interested.)

I’m still freaking out though. And then I had this itty bitty, quiet little epiphany. It was so quiet, I almost missed it.

I always thought I freaked out because I couldn’t handle large amounts of rapid change that require me to stretch and grow in different ways.

Turns out, that’s not quite true. I’m handling the change fine. My fear is entirely that I won’t be able to handle it at some future date. Or that I’ll stop being able to handle it. Or that I’m handling it too well and I’m not really allowed to do anything well, so I freak out about that too.

All of my freaking out is entirely hypothetical. I can totally handle what I’ve taken on. And I mean, even if I couldn’t, the worst thing that happens is these things don’t happen. So big whoop. We have to wait a bit, we have to be patient. No small children will die. But that is really the worst case scenario.

So why am I freaking out that I’m going to start freaking out? It seems a bit counter productive (uhhh, to say the least.)

As usual, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess this fear is trying to protect me. Of course it is – that’s its function. It just loves me and wants me to be safe. The problem is that its idea of safe is a bit different from mine. It thinks the only way I’m safe is by never changing anything, just in case I can’t handle the change – and my idea of safe is…well I’m not sure. But something quite a bit more broad than that.

I don’t really have a solution for being overwhelmed by the possibility of overwhelm. But just by understanding that it’s not real, and all of that is just the story in my head – well it helps immeasurably. And as I sit here eating my dinner, I feel just the tiny bit of calm returning to my world.

Tags: change, Fear, overwhelm