Day 569

The day started poorly but ended better.

Woke up out of sorts and the shopping was horrible: I waited till I knew they'd have non-self-serve checkout lines but it was crowded and there was a lot of restocking going on so the aisles were very clogged. Also I was dragging around a lot of pebbles in my bag of resentment over having to do the menus and the shopping and the meal prep in the first place.

When I got home I made the decision that I wasn't doing anything else at all today apart from dinner - and I was in such a bad mood immediately post-grocery that "dinner" might have been the family sized Stouffer's mac-n-cheese I had in the freezer as backup and not the chicken fajitas I planned. No Christmas baking or fudge-making either...I was way too Grinch-y to even think about holiday festivities.  Other than to set them on fire, that is.

NOT powering through all the stuff on my hypothetical it-would-be-nice-to-do list and giving myself permission to do nothing at all was very helpful.  Self-care means "don't pile on." After a nice lie-down I was able to at least wash the peppers for the fajitas, thinking all the while "I still don't have to make it. See what I feel like when it's time. They'll keep in the fridge." I also told myself that if I didn't want to EVER do any more Christmas baking than what I'd already done that was fine too. It wasn't an obligation, just an idea.  That helped too: instead of letting the resentment build I let it dissipate.

After an afternoon of computer games I felt quite a bit better - amazing how much permission to goof off helps. I considered going ahead with the fudge but thought it was wiser to stick with just dinner instead. Moving away from Grinch Who Incinerated Everything was good enough; no need to jump right back into Suzie Homemaker. So that's what I did.

It seems ridiculously easy in retrospect to respond to "Waah!  The important thing was icky and hard and yucky!" with "Aw, that's too bad...it needed done though so to show thanks and appreciation let's just have you take the rest of the day off." In practice, though, it's all too easy to ignore or "power through" the voice saying "hey, wait a minute!" That's not a good idea though because resentment is a big ol' alarm clock for the Drink Now voice. Pro-active self-care, on the other hand, keeps it asleep the way it ought to be.