I had the occasion to observe a family of four briefly this weekend and their eldest child, a boy of about 9-years of age, offered such an elegant example of The Art of Making Yourself Miserable that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
That feeling of being “on duty” endlessly is exhausting, whether you’re caring for your children, your parents, your siblings, or a spouse. Your attention is constantly on what might happen next, when the phone is going to ring, or that worst-case-scenario about to unfold.
Whether it is the result of isolation and loneliness or “too much family time” brought on by the pandemic, we’re all more aware of our own stress & anxiety than we may ever have been in the past.
This Christmas, I bought myself a special gift, Brené Brown’s new book, Atlas of the Heart. It is a book that catalogs emotions (both traits and states) and gives a new level of precision to the language we use to express how we feel.
We do this to ourselves, you know! Our impossible wish for the picture-perfect holiday, our expectations of a dinner table worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting, the need to out-gift or over-gift because we haven’t seen family members for months, even years on end. It’s a lot.
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