- All The Joyful Things
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- January 9, 2024
Hello friends,
It has been really interesting to go back to my prompts and journal entries from this time last year and see how I answered the same questions then. Around this time last year, I was just coming to terms with my ADHD and my RA diagnosis. I’ve come so far in managing both in the last year. What felt like hard obstacles or even barriers at the time are now simply facts that I have to take into consideration in my planning, but don’t hinder me from achieving anything. Here is a little excerpt of my journal entry from last year:
I'm working actively on being more compassionate to myself and not measuring my performance against a past that was never sustainable to begin with. But I struggle with this one, a lot. Realigning my expectations of myself with reality feels like admitting: I am not as "good" as I thought I was. I am in some ways less then.
I put that on myself and it is an incredible disservice I do to myself, because my skills and my ambitions have not changed. Anything I could achieve working in that way, I can achieve working in a way that is kinder to myself. It may take a little longer, but it will be stronger and more stable. And what I want to build, I want to see last and grow.
I continue to do the work to understand how my limitations and working with them instead of against them helps me build and grow sustainably, so to do that, lets take 5-15 minutes and write about
How do react to your own limitations?
Something I’ve been working through a lot over the last year and am grappling with even more directly now as I think about heading back into work, taking the GRE, and applying for graduate school is my tendency to slip back into the same patterns the moment I feel like I’m recovering a bit. Now that I’m feeling better, I can just do the same things that made me sick in the first place right and expect different results.
That has definitely been my pattern in the past. Exhaustion, burnout, immediate return to the previous status quo.
So I guess one of the ways I react to my own limitations is outright denial. In my contextualization of this prompt and looking back at what I wrote last year, I wrote about how changing my behavior to account for my limitations actually allows me to build a stronger foundation. That is what I want my reaction to be.
I want my reaction to be kindness, self-compassion, reflection, and leveraging, instead of frustration and sadness.
So what are my limitations? In order to account for them and potentially even leverage them, I need to be clear on what they are.
Last year I wrote, “You are more likely to reach your goals if they are realistic. I want to stress again that I don't mean small or easy. I encourage you to dream as big as you possibly can! I also encourage you to be patient and recognize that even on days that start slower or where you don't recognize your growth because it doesn't feel the way you expect it to, you are still making progress.” I still stand fully behind that.
Our limitations aren’t barriers. They are just factors. So I want more self-compassion. I want more ease. And I want all of this for both of us.
Your friend,
Laura