Know Thy Limits

Most of my posts have a certain theme to them -- my reflecting upon something that I am thinking or feeling. I don't think that this will be much different from that, but it will expand a little bit from the normal. Why? Because it's relevant.

I am thinking of Sally specifically, as I start this off. The mail reason is a short interaction that we'd had today. You may remember from my other post (The "write stuff"... and other errata) that I had the sense that something was going on with Sally. Well, yes, there is.

During our brief interaction today, she noted that she was feeling a significant amount of stress. See. I knew something was happening! While I might be tempted to think that it's all about our relationship, I know that this is not the case. The fact is that she's got sources of stress aplenty:

• Her relationship with Ranger Rick;
• Relationship with her kids (mostly grown);
• Relationship with the extended family;
• Her relationship with me;
• Her personal goals not moving as fast as she'd like them to;
• Substantial challenges at work with revenue and personnel issues;
• etc

On top of this, she's a very driven person. She does more in a 24 hour period than many do in 3x that time. No kidding. At the same time, this comes at a cost. Her well being is a concern, because I think at some point, she is going to pay dearly for it. Of course, given the circumstances, there's only so much room I have to influence that.

The key question here is, at least for the moment, what does this have to do with me? Good question!

How it's relevant is that I am under very significant stress as well. Career, marriage, relationships, physically, etc. There's practically no area of life that I would say is "working well" or not a source of some stress. In fact, I'd say that most everything is coming flying apart at high speeds -- I'm just lucky that I haven't been hurt by the pieces yet.

I do my best to deal with it, but it does take a toll on a person and isn't always as opaque as I'd like it to be. Case in point was my dinner last week with Sally. She mentioned afterward that "I looked like I was stressed". Fact of the matter is that I was feeling a bit stressed, so she was right in noting it. The other factor there was that I was also feeling fatigued. I don't know how much was attributable to stress or fatigue, but the important part was that it showed! It wasn't neutral.

Historically, I've not been good at recognizing my limits. I've tended to go way past where I should stop, because I couldn't tell that I needed to stop. I just kept on going, until something broke. In a few cases, it was me. Never a good thing.

So one of the good things about this separation from Sandy and having to deal with Sally through this is that I am going to have to examine and confront my own limits. It's part of what I need to do to be real about what it will take to live my life from here forward.