Giving Up

Yep, I gave up. For about four months. As much as I want to say that I shouldn't have, I think it was a really good decision for our specific situation. I'll explain:

I was a few months away from finishing school and I was applying for jobs. Things were overwhelming and chaotic and awful. I felt exhausted and beat down at the end of every single day. And this was just from school and taking care of my children. Now, you would think this is WHY I should have continued with my challenge straight through this. But I kept beating myself up about it. I wasn't getting anything extra done even though it was constantly on my mind. Every three weeks or so, I'd clean a bathroom and feel really great, but then get sucked into overwhelming despair again.

I finally re-assessed things with myself and decided to step back from simplifying our life. I knew school would be ending at a set date, so I made the decision to focus on graduating and to stop beating myself up about what I wasn't doing. Because you know what? I was doing a lot. I was causing extra stress for myself unnecessarily by not letting it go. I simplified by pausing the grand simplification.

This provided me with an opportunity to do two things:

1) Focus on what absolutely had to be done during that moment in time. In my case, that was school. I had one more term to get through and it was going to be a doozy. I couldn't afford to let anything deter my graduation. I'd worked too hard to let myself self-destruct at the last minute.

2) Re-assess what I really wanted from simplifying our life. And I will tell you that this was massively eye-opening. I read Tsh Oxenreider's Notes from a Blue Bike and I cried. Oh, I cried. I think I spent the majority of the book in tears. It allowed me to understand that there are others out there who crave what I crave, and who find a way to push back on how our overly busy culture tells us we should be living. It helped me understand that I don't just want an organized house, or to save money on our groceries, but that I want experiences over things. I want to experience joy with my children instead of pushing stress on them by constantly having to be somewhere. I want to have an impromptu outing to the park simply because, and be able to say yes to things because my schedule isn't dictating my life. I want to travel and show my children the world, and I want to be able to afford those experiences because I'm not giving into the myth of having to have a bigger house or the newest gadgets or the latest designer shoes.

Ever since I re-assessed, I am filled with joy. I feel happy and positive, more than I have in a very long time. Now that I'm done with school, I'm working on simplifying things again. I'm also spending lots of time with my kids and we're having so much fun this summer. So yes, giving up (temporarily!) was a very good thing.