Wedding and Family and Work, Oh My!

Overwhelmed, anxious, avoidant, isolated, infuriated.  These are just the tip of the iceberg of emotions I’ve been experiencing for the past six months!  Trying to find a balance between family, work, and planning a wedding has left me stressed, to say the least… paralyzed is probably a more accurate term to describe my past couple of months.Managing major life transitions, whether it’s planning a wedding, having a baby, acclimating to a new job, moving into a new home, going through a breakup/divorce, going back to school, mourning, etc. can be quite difficult.  There are days that I’m highly motivated and productive, and then there are more days when I just want to run away and hide from it all.  It feels like I’m learning to juggle, and life keeps throwing me more and more balls before I’ve learned how to balance the first two!Life transitions can be incredibly stressful, and I think we oftentimes don’t acknowledge just how much of an impact they can have on our emotional health.  Especially when we are going through a “positive” transition, we tell ourselves we should be happy or this should be a joyous occasion.  And it turns out, we end up really invalidating ourselves.  We have these expectations and when our emotions don’t necessarily align with what we expected them to be, we end up judging ourselves and feeling confused on top of all the other uncomfortable emotions we’re experiencing.  The result?  Well, for me, it left me feeling helpless and lost.The advice that my amazing team members have offered have a common theme: identifying my priorities.  So I’m starting to pause and check in with myself.  First I ask myself, what emotion am I feeling?  A lot of the time, the answer is stressed, overwhelmed, spread too thin (not an emotion word, I know).  So then I ask myself, what is the priority RIGHT NOW?  What do I have control over RIGHT NOW?  And what can I do RIGHT NOW?  From there, it’s been a matter of taking things one step at a time.  Because ultimately, I am only ONE person and the only thing I can do is what I’m doing RIGHT NOW.  And the one thing I do now is one less thing for me to do later.  One thing at a time.  Just this one moment, just this one task.