In the depths of despair recently (and by despair, I mean a mental crossroads where anxiety and depression were colliding together at the same intersection) I began arguing with myself in my head. My period cycle had started, impromptu and unwelcomed and of course heavier than normal; I had a full day of work ahead and loads of youth sports to attend late into the afternoon and evening and in one part thinking, one part screaming to myself in my head I thought…” come on body can you give me a freaking break for once.” Just as the words processed through my brain, my thoughts came alive in disagreement and anger as an immediate rebuttal to that statement came into my head. The question I immediately flashed on was…. what would my body say back to me if it could? With lightning speed, a barrage of comments began to formulate in my mind. With a weird sense of assurance, I knew that my body would scream back at me “Are you freaking kidding me? Work with you for a moment? We haven’t slept for more than six straight hours in months. You spend day and night worrying about the kids and keep our blood pressure and heart rate through the roof constantly. You don’t feed us adequately for the energy level that you require of us, you don’t hydrate us appropriately for how much you run us to the ground. You expect us to be sharp, you expect us to perform well at work, you expect us to do all the schedules and extra activities for the family, you expect us to clean your house, be physically active make sure we have the energy that is needed throughout our day and evening. You expect us to stay sharp enough to remember everything…know all the answers to all the questions and get angry when we forget a few! We ask that you give us a break! Where are the books, you swore we were going to have time to read? Where are the hours of binge-watching TV shows you swore we were going to sit and watch? What about all the self-care items we bought from the store that you promised we were going to start using every night before bed? There are things WE require to keep US functioning and YOU need to start giving us a break!”
Now I admit that I can be self-critical (and clearly very imaginative) and when I allow my thoughts to wander, they can find my faults quickly, but this thought stream was very accurate and a necessary one. I do run this ship at full speed and expect more. It was truly sobering to think that this is what my body would like to tell me if it had the power to do so. It’s not as if I don’t desire to do all those things and it’s not as if I wouldn’t understand my body’s disagreement and sheer anger at me for the lack of follow-through on several of those items. As women, I am not sure if we ever really grasp the demands that we place on our bodies and our minds and the constant scrutiny that it is under. I need to work harder to recognize the overall needs of my body as a whole and that does start with prioritizing self-care. I challenge you to ask your body what it wants to tell you, it knows more than you think.