Full. Anxious.

The two words forming the light side/dark side framework of my emotional life right now are "full" and "anxious", in all their nuanced shadings and entendres. Full because, well, duh, do I really need to go through that again?--ok, full of activities, full of work, full of thingstodoplacestogopeopletosee. Most often, life is full in the sense of "containing all that can be contained" and "stretched to capacity". But life is also full in the sense(s) of "complete", "abundant", "rich", "satisfied", and "generous". Yes, I'd do much better with a little more sleep, and it'd be great to have a few more hours in the day so that a wee tiny measure of leisurely downtime could be indulged in here and there, but despite that, life still consistently delivers the good stuff. Case in point, just today: stealing a few moments of leisure and snuggles in a hammock with my boys on a beautiful late summer evening, as geese honked and airplanes zoomed overhead.

(and yes, I do have approximately a zillion pictures that I have not yet bothered taking the time to upload to our family gallery site; "archivist" is just not high on my job description list right now)

But (for posterity) I also want to record the dark side--there is just so much anxiety floating around the aether of my thoughts these days as well. Anxiety about work (mostly performance and money related, natch). Anxiety about starting a new venture--par for the course, I know, but still. Anxiety about the increasing compaction of time and that possibly important things could get lost in the shuffle (if they don't get exploded or squoze down into diamonds by all that pressure). Anxiety about parking the kids in front of the TV so much lately. Anxiety about being perceived as a bad friend because I just don't have the bandwidth for check-ins on top of everything else. Anxiety about aging and physical health and body image, exemplified by the familiar poster child of weight gain--all that "full" stuff has led to a return to emotional eating (yes, I know there's a pun in there somewhere), and I just haven't had the energy to stamp it out again. Anxiety about amount and quality of creative output--with VP looming on the horizon I just can't seem to shake the persistent bugaboo of "oh god maybe I really *am* boring/unoriginal/lazy/ignorant/all around unfit for membership in the club". I'm sure if I thought about it more I'd find at least 6 other things I'm anxious about but even this incomplete list of anxiety producers is making me--yeah, anxious. I wish my brain had a "power down" button, it'd come in handy these days. Or maybe just an "interrupt negative cycle/replace with positive thoughts" program. That'd be handy too. I'm hoping that just putting it all down here in Parenthetical form will exorcise some of it, at least.

Sigh. If it wasn't already past my bedtime, I'd try to elaborate more, but I think just opening the can of worms is all I can do for now. I do know that for both the fullness and the anxiety, the cure seems to be composed of equal parts 1) increasing my skill at compartmentalization and 2) giving myself a break. (And let's not forget that crazy old wives' remedy, "getting more sleep".)

Speaking of which….