Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

I feel incredibly overwhelmed: exhausted, intermittently light-headed (what does cause that?) and headachey (albeit niggling stress headachey rather than migrainey). I have a To Do chart on my wardrobe door. I write different tasks to do on slips of coloured paper (broadly: green for wedding stuff, pink for other things, although it’s not 100% consistent) and move the slips between columns for To Do, Processing and Finished (I take them off Finished after a while). My therapist suggested this instead of a traditional To Do list, as I can see progress, which is less overwhelming and is self-esteem boosting.

The last few days I’ve started a second To Do list, which is a short-term list until I get around to writing the tasks out on the coloured paper, which I haven’t had time/energy/headspace for yet. And now the second list is getting crowded… There’s just so much to do in so little time and so much that seems urgent and/or important. It’s so hard to know where to begin. And ongoing things like exercise and novel research/writing have just vanished in the last two months where I’ve been so busy with the civil wedding and the autumn Jewish festivals. This is where I feel the effects of executive dysfunction, although I feel like I used to be better at planning, so maybe there’s learned helplessness too.

I feel like I really need a mental health day, a day where I do no work or urgent tasks, but which isn’t Shabbat or Yom Tov so I can watch TV and write and just potter around aimlessly. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that I will get a day like that this week. And meanwhile I need to book a trip to New York to see E, and to sort out the tax fiasco, and to chase various people about wedding stuff and a million little jobs and and and and…

Advertisement