Self-honesty and self-love

I had a heat episode today.  I felt it coming and left the event earlier than planned, but left it a bit too late and nearly passed out on the way back to the car.  I've spent the afternoon just resting and being easy on myself.  "So what," you might think: isn't that what a normal person would do?  Exactly.  This simple normal thing is a very big deal for me.

One of my lifetime challenges has been dealing with the self-loathing that seems to go hand-in-hand with perfectionism and the inevitable falling-short that accompanies just normal life.  When one is a perfectionist, nothing can ever measure up.  Some perfectionists look outward for causes/reasons/blame and blame others.  Many of us blame ourselves, leading to dissatisfaction with everything, anger and oftentimes problems with depression.  My "former life" (before divorce) was very marked with this kind of stressful outlook and it has led to a lot of pain over the years, not just for me but for others around me.

Post-divorce, life as a single mom taught me, sometimes in brutal fashion, that I could not do it all, and in fact, couldn't do very much of anything sometimes.  I was short of money, short of patience, short of humor and short of time.  Life was hard in a way that it had never been.  I became the recipient of charitable works, and dependent on others in a way that I had never had to be.  It was a completely humbling experience and my own personal "rock bottom."

The only way to come through this was to learn to accept my limitations and stop being angry about my shortcomings.  I had to start focusing on what I could do rather than what I couldn't.  I had to learn to let go, say "no" sometimes, and be okay with that.  That also had to be done for physical frailties which occasionally strike me.  One of these is heat intolerance.

I've never liked the heat, but didn't consider it anything other than a personal preference.  Some years ago we went to the beach and camped.  We had A/C in the camper, but the only other place to enjoy the cool in the SC state campground was the camp store.  Over the course of a few days, I thought I was staying well hydrated and coping with the heat, but then I had an episode of loss of peripheral vision, some dry skin and a terrible feeling come over me.  My husband became somewhat alarmed and sent me back to the camper to rest in the A/C.  After several hours of that, I felt somewhat better, but I really didn't feel well for several days after that.  Following that episode, I found my heat tolerance to be drastically reduced and I couldn't even do things that I had done in the past.  Truthfully, it made me pretty angry with circumstances and with myself for "being so weak."   This, my friends, is not sane thinking.  Obviously I had suffered something like mild heatstroke and had some expected effects from that.  I'm lucky it wasn't worse.

After hitting "rock bottom," becoming more sane has been a process.  Today, not adding layers of self-loathing for a physical weakness I couldn't help made my day more ordinary, if not less inconvenient.  Wow.  What a blessing.