Humble Pie and A Crisis of Confidence (or, Even Olympians Get The Blues)

Um, hi (she said, sidling shamefacedly back onto the blogging stage). Miss me?

Ok, so somehow a month without blogging just slid on by. (They do that, those pesky slippery months.) In a full-up life, something always has to give and this month it was writing (journaling, blogging, novel, the whole shebang). It's not that it hasn't been an eventful month with much that could (or should) have been recorded for posterity--far from it. In fact, there's almost too much, and I'm still too exhausted from living it to really reflect on it yet (at least in public).

But I have learned something important over the last few weeks, something I didn't really want to learn (but the Universe doesn’t give a crap whether you're "in the mood" for your lessons or not, you just get handed them anyway and you either deal or you don't): I learned I have limits. More specifically, I learned what my particular limits are. Without going into painful detail, I bumped up against something that forced me to acknowledge the actual limits to what I can truly handle and on how much energy I can put out, physically, mentally and emotionally. And that was hard to face. (Now don't laugh, I'm trying to get used to choking down some humble pie here.) I thought I was such a world-class gold medalist in the suck-it-up Olympics (and I am), so much so that I've been taking a perverse sort of pride in my ability to keep on keeping on through storm, hail, snow, overwhelm, crisis, drama, whatever. But guess what? Even highly disciplined and experienced Olympians can only push themselves so far before their performance starts to suffer more than it's worth. And there's a reason why some people consider pride a sin--it can really be damaging to one's self, let alone to others.

So yes, yes, of course this realization of limits has been a good lesson for me to learn--a perfectly reasonable, mature, and ultimately healthy (in an oat-bran-for-the-soul kind of way) one. But god, it smarts. And in its wake I find myself struggling with a general "crisis of confidence" where I start to ooze down the slippery slope of self-doubt and find myself wondering if I can handle *anything* anymore, let alone the usual juggling load. I know that if I just get back in the saddle, so to speak, this feeling will pass and I'll get some of the confidence (not the pride, but the confidence) back, but oof. I feel like the wind's really been knocked out of me for a bit. Or to go back to the Olympic athlete metaphor for a minute, I feel like a downhill skier who has a bad fall and now I'm just that crucial little bit more hesitant to tackle the next run. I guess I'll just have to settle for being somewhat less than gold-medal quality for awhile, and go back into training mode where it's all about the process, not the end result. Right? Right. Now pass me some liquid courage to wash down that humble pie with, will you? <cough>