The Life Decluttering Begins...

My 2019 word of the year is FOCUS and my theme is the YEAR OF WOW! 

Here is what I want to succeed at in 2019:

• I want a joyful job that delights and fulfills me and allows me to make a great income while still keeping my stress level low and my happiness quotient high.

• I want to be able to sing with joy and project how great it is to love my Lord to everyone that hears me.

• I want to feel like I am doing a great job and know I am succeeding at maintaining my parent’s health and keeping them happy and worry-free in their later years.

• I want to maintain a balance between my hobbies and not obsess over one craft or another

• I want 2019 to be the year I declutter everything that is not serving me in life and then organize everything else in a way that supports my new healthy, happy lifestyle.

• I want 2019 to be the year I focus on me and my own health. I want to exercise more and feel better in my own skin.

If I want to live up to these things I am prescribing for myself at the beginning of the year, I have a lot of decluttering to do in my life. Currently, I am not succeeding at any of the above bullet points. I am not happy. I am overwhelmed. I am tired. And I really have no patience for most things that are stressors in my life. And that has to change.

My backstory...

I am currently trying to take better care of my parents... I am watching out for their needs, cooking most days and doing a lot of things I haven’t done before. This weighs heavy on my mind… especially this past year when many things came to a head late in October. My mom went into the hospital for a week (ICU for three days) with low oxygen levels. I am learning all about how to deal with the equipment for oxygen management and how to maintain all the various things that have invaded our house due to this new diagnosis. This also includes making sure Mom keeps the oxygen hose on her nose, has the unit turned on and has adequate water to keep her airways hydrated.

The overwhelm continues with my job which seems to get more stressful as time goes on. And that may be due to inadequate staffing as well as my ability to deal with BS the newspaper industry offers. My ability to handle BS has nearly reached its limit, I’m afraid, but I must soldier on. I know a lot of that is my own mental health issues and ability to handle stress. I am dealing with that by taking my evening hours to craft, cross stitch and crochet.

This leads me to my involvement with the worship team at church. I have not been happy there for a long time. And I have been thinking about quitting even before we got our current director. I do my best to deal with a leader who seems to try and verbally knock me down whenever he gets the chance and I have tried to learn how to deal with him, but he is a very closed off individual and I feel, not open emotionally at all to most people. This is my own opinion and experience and maybe not an opinion held by others but I haven’t done a poll.

I try my best to follow the lead the director takes each week but he is very inconsistent with singing songs the same way from one time to the next. I try to roll with the punches and yet stand up for myself and my co-singers when he tries to bully us into submission on how he wants to sing a song. 

At a recent worship team meeting, there was mention of how we all didn’t follow the lead of the director and sing a specific part the way he did. Even if we point out that we didn't learn it that way, we still do it like he wants. So I am not sure why it keeps getting pointed out to us that we need to submit to how he does things. Currently we practice a song once. And if we don’t get it perfect I feel we are looked down upon... Even though we probably haven’t sang that particular song in five weeks or more. 

I do my best every week. I try and roll with the punches but singing on the team does not make me happy. I do not feel joy when I do it. All I feel is the massive stress and assumptions of everyone as to why I am not doing better, singing better or being better.  I really don’t feel appreciated for my contribution; even when I try my best, I am found lacking, I struggle just like everyone else. Life happens and I don’t have time to practice, have an off note or whatever. But I feel like the hammer comes down on me when I am less than stellar even when others are constantly off key and get no corrective notes.

I am not sure what to do at this point. Where does the rubber meet the road and when will my patience run out completely. Only time will tell. I just know that I want to live a more happy life and live that life on purpose. And this is telling me that a happy life for me does not include the worship team.

So, where do I go from here?

The life decluttering begins. 

I will work on me and my 2019 aims bulleted above. I want to strive to be more happy and fulfilled in all I do and if I cannot find that feeling, remove that thing from my life until I can find a way to make it delight me in the future.

It is all a process. We stumble, we fall and we pick ourselves up again.

I pray 2019 is the year that I can take back my life and live it to its fullest. I hope you can too.

Blessings.