Recently I’ve been trying to find ways to boost myself out of feeling overwhelmed. For example, I’ll remind myself of the many times I’ve had to learn that it can be so much easier to remove the source of overwhelmitude than to continue to be overwhelmed by it. Like when a pile of Christmas card supplies (admittedly a daunting pile of things that needed to be put away in places all over the house) got knocked off the table onto the dining room floor by a child (admittedly an annoying and unfair situation), and I let it sit there for literally MONTHS before spending (again literally) less than five minutes to clean it up. And then I sat there thinking about how that messy heap had oppressed me almost every day. What a bargain that was: probably hours and hours of oppression to save myself five minutes! which eventually had to be spent anyway!
So. Today I felt all motivated, ready to start TACKLING things instead of letting them fester. And I thought, “I have some time! I’ll clean the bathroom! It oppresses me many times a day!” So I started cleaning it, and I am continuing to be literal when I say that in the first five minutes of unpleasant cleaning (it was hot and stuffy in the bathroom, and of course I hate/resent cleaning it or else I wouldn’t be putting it off), FOUR CHILDREN knocked on the door saying they needed to go to the bathroom.
I gave patient “I’m cleaning in here—use the downstairs bathroom” replies to the first two children, but then made the classic error of dealing with a SERIES of individuals as if they are all the SAME individual (an example of this is when a clerk treats a customer as if that single customer needs something explained to them for the thousandth time, rather than being the thousandth person to need it explained), and I snapped at the third child and yelled at the fourth.
Later, the fourth child asked me if I was still crabby, and I said yes, but added that at this point I was more crabby about having been crabby: I’d had time to come up with and feel bad about the clerk analogy. But I was ALSO still PLAIN crabby: my goal was so reasonable, and the interruptions were so reasonable (though FOUR children needing to go to the bathroom in the same five-minute interval is not QUITE in need of the word “so” before the word “reasonable”), and yet together those two reasonable things caused a situation that felt completely unreasonable and impossible to handle, which is another way to say OVERWHELMING.
Although I’ve learned again and again from examples like the one where it was so relatively easy to pick up and put away the Christmas card stuff, I’ve ALSO learned again and again from examples like today’s attempt to clean the bathroom: it really WASN’T worth it.
I know exactly what you mean, even though my husband never feels this way and that in and of itself is overwhelming.
My solution to things that are bugging me, which only work for people who are ok with non-instant gratification cleaning: do only a little bit of the thing that is bugging me (i.e. weeding out the file cabinet, which I avoided for YEARS but felt overwhelmed by daily) for about five minutes a day, until the problem is dealt with. It is slow, but it is also the only way I know to not be completely overwhelmed. That is also the reason that I clean the bathrooms for one minute every day, so they do not get overwhelmingly messy. I wish I could learn this same thing with gardening or the chicken coop (which I am currently avoiding cleaning) or the moss or, I don’t know, LIFE, but at least I have a clean filing cabinet.
I hear ya about being overwhelmed and snappy. Flylady (flylady.net) changed my life in regards to all the housework that I find generally oppressive, thus making me undesirable “mommy” material. I don’t follow her stuff to a tea, but she’s definitely changed my perspective about managing household drudgery.
Hah, I am AT THIS EXACT MOMENT putting off tidying up the kitchen and living room because it overwhelms and just plain pisses me off that both rooms were SPOTLESS last night and are already disaster-ish again. Well. But not really disasterish… They just LOOK that way: there’s library books and toy cars and random swimming pool supplies strewn all over the living room, but really ten minutes would put it all to rights. Yet I’ve been stalking through there crossly and ignoring it for hours now. Very mature. Jim always laughs at me when I get grouchy about kid/toy messes and says, “Either decide to ignore it for tonight or decide to clean it up, or ask me to clean it up, and it’ll be done in much less time than you’re spending glaring at it!” Which I know. It’s always true. But messes do have a way of making me feel resentful and disrespected. “I just cleaned and everyone runs around trashing things with no regard for all the work I do!”
Anyways. My point! Is that I know how you feel! And have no good ideas for overcoming it other than just doing the work and HOPING it’ll make you feel better even though sometimes it just makes you feel hot and pissy.
@Sarah I was going to say your hubs was amazing for figuring out what you were glaring at and giving you such sage advice. But before I finished thinking it the thought that since he knows you are glaringly bothered HE COULD TIDY UP WITHOUT WAITING FOR YOU TO ASK. Because I suspect that is the real problem. That he knows it is untidy, and is willing to tidy, ( which already puts him way ahead of every male I know except my anal retentive brother) but he still wont do it unless you request he tidy otherwise he’ll ignore it. ( which drops him right back in the lineup).
This morning I was put to shame by my exactly two-year-old. I was feeling grumpy and overwhelmed about the scattered toys and clutter in the play area. So while I dithered and fretted, I assigned her a small task – put the trains in the box. Which she did. And then, of her own volition, she moved on to the marble run. And once those two things were tidied up, all of a sudden the degree of clutter was no longer overwhelming. She kept going and I got started. Tidy in no time.
And so it was: my two-year-old had to show me the way to tidying up. win? fail? dunno.
Swistle, you are my hero! You always seem to say so succinctly just exactly what I’m thinking, and then you ACT on it (which I don’t, because I’m useless) and come up with brilliant analogies that make me see my own behaviour so much more clearly (the snitty clerk/1000 clients is perfect).
You deserve a Nobel Prize for something… Understanding How Being a Woman/Mother Works, or something perhaps?
I follow flylady as well – in case you were after advice instead of just venting!
Your timing is always superb! The clutter/mess on the kitchen counters has been irritating me for MONTHS, so Saturday I spent 2 hours organizing and cleaning those counters. On the one hand, I can hardly believe how happy it makes me every time I see those clean counters, but, on the other hand, I am also stalking those same counters and becoming very upset each time I see that someone has left a mess on MY CLEAN COUNTERS! Despite all the time it took me to clean them! And, despite the fact that anyone old enough to reach the counters is also old enough to clean up their messes! I feel like I traded one overwhelming thing for another; I put drops in the bucket, but 5 people are drilling holes in my bucket as I’m trying to get the drops in!
Ugh, cleaning is my overwhelming issue. RUE THE DAY that I became the main cleaner in my household.
It just gets messed up in a few hours, which is why i put it off and then ultimately get overwhelmed by it.
Oh, we are such kindred spirits in overwhelmitude (and I am totally stealing that word). It somehow takes on a life of its own that has nothing to do with the enormity of the task or the time required to complete it. The dread becomes the central point. Ick, ick ick.
“The dread becomes the central point.”
YES.
Oh, your clerk analogy is BRILLIANT! I am so susceptible to that. It’s a struggle to remember that just because 4 co-workers have asked the same question, doesn’t mean I can snap at the fourth because I’ve already answered that! Ditto to people who take a long time to explain a situation to me that I understood from their first sentence (or understood from context clues such as who is asking the question when).
Just last week I was complaining to a friend that I’m actually concerned that if I didn’t regularly dig out the kitchen table and counter, our house would begin to resemble an episode of Hoarders. I’m crabby that I have to tidy it up, I’m crabby it gets buried again, I’m crabby because it never ends, and then I’m just crabby. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I were a person who didn’t mind clutter and didn’t even notice it like everyone else in my family. Perhaps will undergo hypnosis to make that happen and then I will hardly ever be crabby ;-)
Overwhelmed = the story of my life!
This reminds me of my husband’s Saturday shirt: “Weeks of programming saves hours of planning.” Or something like that. You get the gist. Also, if you’re like me, you don’t even remember your post from 6/19, so you’ll get this comment and be like, “Whuh?” But I’ve been out of town, and I refuse to let this Google Reader gang up on me. So there. Powering through.