A muscle or a circuit, I can’t think of a good analogy

I have heard resilience described as a muscle, that we can train and make stronger.  That may well be true.  But you can also over train a muscle, doing significant damage and making it so that the simplest of everyday tasks (sitting down, lifting your arms to dry your hair) and be painful or even impossible.

I think that is true of resilience as well – we can over use the muscle, or force too much current through the circuit, blowing it out.  What happens next is like our over training story, where you walk down the stairs backward because you can’t go down them the normal way, or you decide to put your hair into a ponytail and skip the blow out.

That’s where my life is right now.  In the span of 1 year I dealt with 2 deaths in the family, buying and selling a home, moving a significant distance away from my support network, marital stress, job loss (my husband’s – and he still hasn’t found a job 2+ years later), a child who suffered significantly as a result of the move, and of course all the minutiae that comes along with trying to move your family and deal with everyday life and never knowing whether your husband will be working or not.  (He’s been doing temp work.  Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it sucks.  Right now it sucks.)

Yesterday was a bridge too far and I was reduced to a crying mess and went to bed at 8 because I just couldn’t cope any more.  It doesn’t even need to be a big thing (I would describe yesterday as medium), but when the muscle is over worked or the circuit is blown, the amount of the extra load doesn’t matter – the answer is going to be “no.”  I can’t handle life’s bumps – my ability to do so is completely used up.

Ugh, you know?  Some days, just ugh.  In the meantime......