The New (Old) Pandemic

I'm not going to bore you, dear reader, with explanations on why it's been so long since my last post. That's banal and self-indulgent, and the reality is that you probably don't care. What I will share, however, is that I've been incredibly, insanely, overwhelmingly busy.

An average day in my life as a youth pastor looks like this:

• Wake up + caffeinate

• Get to office

• Work on youth sermon + Sunday sermon

  • Also, figure out what game and events to plan for in the upcoming weeks

• Take care of whatever small fire blooms while in the office a-la church life and ministry in a small town

• Attend meeting of some sort (there's always a meeting, no matter what your career)

• Go grocery shopping

• Come home and cook dinner

  • Ok, ok, fine. Come home and drop off pizzas because after shopping, I'm too tired to cook 9/10 times.

• Do laundry/chores

• Check emails + respond

• Be available 24/7 for my students, parents, family, friends, everyone because if I let one, singular spinning plate drop, the world will end, and my life will be meaningless.

• Try to sleep.

• Can't.

• Remember the graphics/social media posts or announcements I was supposed to do -- do them in bed

• Try to sleep again

• Drifts off around midnight

• Repeat

I am, in a word, exhausted.

If I were to be more poetic, though, I'd tell you that I am like a crop that grows on the edges of a farmer's field; I am in the corners, dry, struggling to obtain the life-giving water that I so desperately need in order to survive.

I'm pooped, y'all.

Burned. Slap. Out.

I have suffered alone because, well, I thought I was supposed to. I thought that it's my duty to always be "on" for everyone else. I thought it was my obligation to sacrifice things like sleep, exercise, and what I wanted to do so that I could meet other people's needs. I felt guilty for wanting time to myself. I felt guilty trying to relax -- in fact, if I stopped moving, just for a second, the anxiety of not-doing-what-I'm-supposed-to-holy-cow was so consuming, my body would produce enough cortisol and adrenaline to power a team of spooked horses.

My tank has been on empty for way too long, and I finally reached my breaking point this month. So, I did what I always do when facing an internal crisis: I went to the library.

I hunted down a book called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking Your Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. It's a book written by women for women. It's a book about what it feels like to be a woman who is depleted, but feels shame for admitting it. It's about managing our stress not our stressors, and completing our stress cycles. It's about finding our Something Greater, and getting enough rest because "Rest is medicine."

It is a book that has been the water I so desperately craved and needed; and because it filled me up, I figured there are other women like me who need to hear what these amazing authors have to say, too.

The most intriguing premise the book proposes is that all women -- ALL women -- are infected from birth with a disease called Human Giver Syndrome. Basically, Human Giver Syndrome teaches us that our sole purpose in life is to serve others. The sisters Nagoski claim that the basic formulation for being a Human Giver is as follows:

"Pretty, happy, yet calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. But above all, tied to the demand to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. Givers are not allowed to impose anything so inconvenient as their own needs, including their difficult emotions, including their stress, on anyone else.

"No need for physical affection. No need for rest. No need to complete the stress response cycle. No emotional need for connection or care. No intellectual need to pursue your own sense of purpose or curiosity. And remember, this is our moral duty. If we fall short of our moral duty, we'll get punished. And if no one's around to punish us, we will just go ahead and beat the [crap] out of ourselves."

If this definition feels familiar, you probably are a victim of HGS. I, for sure most definitely, am.

HGS tells us that instead of putting our own oxygen mask on first, we are obligated to put on everyone else's and MAYBE, perhaps, one day, we'll be able to save ourselves with our own mask.

This way of living is no longer working for me, though. I don't want to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others -- I want to rest and heal and grow and attend to my own needs, just for a little while. I want to navigate my own stress cycles, connect with other people without feeling the pressure to serve them, and just be without feeling the pressure to please.

What about you?