I just made some advertising person really happy using that title, but it’s ingrained in my head so there you have it! Before I begin to write this blog about being O V E R W H E L M E D! I should probably lay out some caveats. Being just a wife and not also a mother with children to consider, to all my friends who are parents I know to the bottom corpuscle of my little toe that I have no idea how overwhelming overwhelm can be when you are a parent AND having to deal with everything else that life throws at you. So that’s caveat number one. In some of the recovery rooms that I have haunted lo these many years, I’ve heard some of the people who have long term sobriety and abstinence acknowledge that the problems they have today, as compared to back when they were indulging, are really “high class” problems. Pretty much anything beyond not waking up on a cold cement floor next to the porcelain throne with vomit on your face can qualify….so I know that my overwhelm is really of the higher class variety…..let that be caveat number two.

I hit overwhelm today at 4:30pm when I walked out of my last class at school and had a couple of hot flashes in the 93 degree heat as I trudged down a couple of flights of stairs and wobbled precariously across wide expanses of cement walkways (why the hell did I think the mules I put on this morning were a good idea?!?) and spastically hobbled up the hills to finally stand in line in order to pay for parking in the garage (which was a last minute choice after waiting for 45 minutes at the full student parking lot for which I have a sticker) Let me just say that every semester that I take my trusty two classes, I have a finer appreciation and a more heightened degree of empathy for all the classes that my fellow students are carrying. I really don’t know how they do it.

The overwhelm pentameter began to make its rhythm known when our “Making Spaces” professor told us that our first modeling assignment was due this coming Monday. On top of that, we were to make little quarter inch and 1/8 inch people, trees, tables and chairs to use as models for our class this semester and bring those in on Monday. Luckily, he realized that perhaps we needed to have a whole class devoted to teaching us how to make unassuming scalable elements when we could barely keep up with him to make 1/3 of an origami human with his fifteen minutes of instruction. On the one hand, my mind was hysterically remembering an episode of CSI where the psychopathic killer made these perfect miniature scenes replete with elements, people, murder weapons…the whole shebang of which I was completely in awe but on the other hand I felt a gurgling panic silently rising up into my throat when the prof passed out these thin little wire reeds that he was then going to teach us how to produce miniature human models..REALLY!!!? I can’t even use my thumbs to type text messages and instead resort guardedly using my index fingers when no one is looking, what the hell makes you think I can whip up a tiny human specimen with a wire as thin as a piece of dental floss!! But I digress.

The good thing about these assignments is that I realized that I had, once again, piled way too many things upon my plate and that something was going to have to give before I ran screaming into the sunset. Luckily, it takes me about 45 minutes to get from school to my home so I had plenty of time to make some panicky phone calls to friends to off load the frothing fear of my mind and get everything back into perspective. As much as I would have you believe that EVERYTHING is a Ten on a scale of 1-10, as any sane person knows that simply is not the truth. I realized that there were at least three meetings that I could re-schedule for next week. I tried to re-schedule the professional presentation that I committed to do on Saturday but with no luck. After working it all out with trusted friends, I was able to get things down to a loud roar.

Tomorrow I plan to take my trusty digital camera to a new neighborhood library and take a plethora of photos so that I can cull through them to pick out 8 that best captures “color” for my project. I’ll also be creating slides for my professional presentation, giving myself permission to do a bit less, perhaps, then say Martha Stewart might do.

Overwhelm is our mind’s way of telling us that we’ve said, “Yes” way too many times. Overwhelm is our heart’s way of reminding us that we’ve forgotten to add in some play time. Overwhelm is our soul’s way of reminding us that we don’t have to do it all alone, there are others out there who can help us when we’ve gone full tilt boogie.

I’m feeling so much better just for having written about this and now sharing it with you! If nothing else, I sure do have verdant grounds for a one woman humorous play sometime in the future!!

How does overwhelm show up for you and what is in your emergency preparedness tool kit to take care of you when it does?