Just Thinking…

I’m fairly happy with my life at the moment.
I am now unemployed, which I am loving at present.
I like the freedom to do whatever, I like the fact that no-one is relying on my for anything.

I am going to spend some time over the coming weeks visiting friends that I haven’t seen in a while, as well as pack up my house and get ready to go to India. I am looking forward to seeing some of my old friends, I don’t have friendships like those ones any more. The type where you can talk about anything and you have something to talk about even if you saw each other yesterday or 3 years ago. I miss some of those people.

Leaving Wollongong feels like it should be sadder than it is. I have been here since 2000, except for some OS trips in there. I don’t know if I will come back to live in Wollongong again. So it feels like I should be sad about that, but I’m not. Its been an interesting place for me, so many ups and downs, the last few years I have been in recovery mode, but I feel like I am actually living again now. I’m excited to see what else the world has for me to see and experience.

I went to the beach today.
I never do that. It was nice, to do something just for fun.
It was great. I am going to try to do it more often.
I like the feeling of living my life compared to the feeling of watching my life. At the beach I felt like I was there, in that moment and I was content to be there in that moment.

…and I am tired.

I don’t know why. I don’t know where this has come from. I don’t know what this is about.

Is it fear? Am I scared of what my life might become. Am I scared that I might fail?

Without goals, failure is inevitable. Yet, I am still disappointed in myself for failing.

So I take the same steps that I always do, just enough to pick myself up for a little while longer, knowing that it’s not enough.

I’m back to being at a point where I look at my life and think “Is this it? Is this really who I am?”
I’m sick again, not really sick, but sick enough that I can’t do the things I want to. I’m craving and eating all the wrong foods and then I get upset that I feel like crap.

I know it takes me longer than most people to recover. So I’m still recovering from NCYC, I’m still recovering from this cold.
Apart from running church last night, I have been laying in bed constantly for over 24 hours. I get a bit dizzy when I stand up and so I use that as an excuse to do nothing.

I operate well in the crisis mode, when the things that need to happen are urgent and are for someone else’s benefit. Now I’m home, not much is all that urgent and the things that kind of are urgent are for me so I can’t be bothered.

I don’t want to be this person.
Unfortunately, this is my default setting.

We are doing a bit of an NCYC debrief at the moment. Darren Wright has set up this cool way to help people think through their experiences and what thay might mean etc.

I just don’t have the energy to do it sp I thought this would be better. I normally journal, especially at things like this and I forgot to bring something to write in this time around, plus I haven’t had much time.

So, here are some of my current thoughts about NCYC.

I feel affirmed in my decision to head to India. I feel like it will be a good place to learn to let go of myself and what I want or experct from life and just learn to live. I feel like its somewhere that I will be able to help as I go without needing to ’sign up’ for long term programs with all the assiciated paperwork and stress.

I have discovered the area of leadership that I go best in, well, discovered is the worng word. I aleady knew this. This week our community leadership was great. We generally worked well together and our community was great. During the week we had three critial incidents. Thats a technical term for some things that were way out of our scope to resolve happened. I was a major part fo two of them. Im not going to go into them at this point, because I don’t want to de-brief the incidents, this is more about my responce and thoughts on them.

I kind of took (or just had) the leadership role in two if the incidents. One of them was managed really well, not only by me but by all the teams/people involved. We ended up with a really good outcome. The other one didn’t have a great outcome, but not a bad one either. I don’t actually know what I could have done differently to change how things played out, but I would have liked a better result.

What it has highlighted for me though, is that I am actually quite good in a crisis. I delegate, I know to keep the right people informed, I don’t fully panic (not to say I don’t panic at all), I actually feel like I function more highly in that type of environment. I know its a Christian thing and people tell you good things all the time because its what Christians do, but I have received quite a few complements about the way that I managed these situations and was able to bounce back to keep going with my other responsibilities. Some people had actually assumed that I had been trained, particularly with the mental health related incident. So I am kind of thinking about maybe what training I can do to work in this kind of area. I seem to thrive in it.

I’m getting a bit too tired to continue. At some point I will write something about what the speakers said and how it has effected me.

My cousin showed me this at Christmas. Enjoy

Apart from the fact that I am still struggling to get out of bed in the mornings, I feel much better this week.
Apart from a chickos run the other night, I have been sticking to a good eating plan and its working. I feel better and I lost 1.9kg this week. That is a lot in one week, its not sustainable, the body responds to big changes in the diet quickly. I am aiming for around 1kg this week.

This afternoon I spent some time making home made muesli. It actually looks yummy. I am hoping that I can start to eat that on the days I don’t have a cooked breakfast.

I still need to work out a way to deal with sugar cravings, I am going to increase the amount of fruit I eat and see if that helps.

I have been seeing a new naturopath herbalist. I really like her, she is straight to the point and is giving me practical ways that I can improve my health and my life.
She says that I am addicted to sugar, and that I should treat it like as addiction (meaning, not just ignore that or think that I can stop whenever I want without help)
So, I am following the eating plan that she gave me and overall I feel better. I have been still having some chocolate and lollies though, but not as many an normal. Today, I am struggling. I want Ice cream or icing sugar or something like that, I know that it does not do anything good for me but I still want it.
I’m trying to find something else that I can eat instead, but I think its just the sugar that I am craving.

I have started seeing a natraupath. She has me on all sorts of vitamins, minerals and herbs to help me get to a decent level of health.
Im just still so tired. I want to be able to get through a day without feeling exhausted.