I wonder how often you find yourself going through the motions.
You get up, go to work, answer messages, organise appointments, check in on friends, manage responsibilities and make sure everybody else is okay. Then you do it all again tomorrow.
Of course, there's nothing unusual about having responsibilities. Caring for people is an important part of being connected to one another. But what happens when so much of our attention is directed outwards that we gradually stop paying attention to ourselves?
Either through disposition, learnt behaviour or positive reinforcement, we become very good at anticipating what other people need. We know who needs checking in on, what needs organising and where we're needed, and this becomes our number one priority. Perhaps a friend is struggling, so you put your own feelings aside. Maybe your parents are getting older, and you're taking on more responsibility. A partner is having a difficult time, so you become the person who holds everything together.
Sometimes these things are unavoidable, and sometimes we consciously choose to prioritise people we love. However, there's a difference between caring for people and feeling that you must always be available to them.
I wonder whether we sometimes confuse being a caring person with being an endlessly available person.
There's also something about the accumulation of these responsibilities that I think is worth paying attention to. Rarely does it happen all at once, it's usually a gradual process, where one person needs a little more support, another situation requires our attention and something else gets added to the list. Before long, we find ourselves operating around everybody else's needs, often without questioning whether we have the capacity to keep doing so.
We're often quite good at managing multiple demands, that other people might not even realise how much we're carrying. We become reliable, dependable and capable. Perhaps people even compliment us on these qualities. But being good at coping doesn't necessarily mean we're coping particularly well.
We can be functioning perfectly well on the outside while feeling disconnected internally.
We're getting everything done, maintaining relationships and fulfilling our responsibilities, but perhaps we've stopped doing things simply because we enjoy them. We struggle to remember the last time we did something spontaneously or made a decision based entirely on what we wanted. Sometimes even relatively straightforward questions become difficult.
What do you enjoy doing? What are you looking forward to? What would you do with a completely free afternoon?
Perhaps there's another question underneath all of this: when did you last feel like yourself, rather than the person everyone else needs you to be?
Our identities can become so closely connected to the roles we occupy that we forget there's an individual underneath all those responsibilities, and that individual needs attention too.
I also think there's something quite uncomfortable about recognising this in ourselves. We might feel guilty for wanting more space, particularly when the people around us are genuinely struggling. We might tell ourselves that other people have it worse, that this is just what being an adult involves, or that we'll make time for ourselves when things settle down. But life has a habit of presenting us with another thing to manage. There will always be somebody who needs something, another appointment to attend or another responsibility to take care of. If we continually wait for everything around us to become manageable before we start living our own lives, we might find ourselves waiting a very long time.
I don't think reconnecting with ourselves needs to involve enormous changes. It might simply mean picking up an old hobby, making plans with a friend, spending time alone or recognising that we're tired and need something to change. You can be a loving partner and still need time away from your relationship. You should be able to support a friend without becoming their only source of support.
It's important that you can enjoy your life without having to justify that enjoyment through how useful or productive it makes you.
Perhaps part of reconnecting with ourselves involves becoming a little more curious about what we actually want, rather than automatically considering what everybody else might need. It means allowing ourselves to have preferences, to change our minds, to say no occasionally and to make room for things that don't serve any particular purpose beyond making us happy.
I think we sometimes underestimate how important these seemingly insignificant parts of life are.
The things we do because we want to, the interests we pursue, the time we spend with people who make us laugh. These experiences remind us that we're more than our responsibilities.
Perhaps the question is how do we start including ourselves in our own lives again?
I'd like to leave you with three questions:
· What parts of yourself have you neglected while looking after everyone else?
· What did you used to enjoy that you've quietly stopped making time for?
· If you had a little more space to live rather than simply manage your life, what would you want to do with it?