Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I posted about being sort of extra busy this summer, and begging your indulgence with my off-again, on-again, hit-or-miss GUS diary situation?
Yeah...good times. Little did I know that the “crazy busy” thing I was experiencing was actually the [relative] calm before the storm. Right after I posted that diary things ramped up at work and simultaneously went absolutely batshit crazy on the homefront. My Dad has some chronic health issues and what had been a tricky couple of weeks (involving a temporarily broken-down wheelchair and his fighting off an infection) evolved into a straight-up failure of services that lasted over the better part of a week. This was almost immediately followed by a more serious health episode that landed him (briefly) in the hospital.
During this time (through which I worked my full-time job and tried to keep my own household going, along with supplementing his network of services with some extra needed help), I was stretched a bit thin. Like, forget-what-day-of-the-week-it-is stretched thin. GUS (and most online stuff) kind of went out the window two weeks in a row. Mea culpa. (No, actually, not all my fault. I take that back. I’m blaming this one on the Universe’s cruel sense of humor and bad timing.)
And while some of us have to operate in crisis mode more than others — with a few of us taking up permanent residency in Crisisville — that doesn’t mean we have to bust out our very best Bad Coping Skills to get by.
Most of us have a handful of Bad Coping Skills, those not-very-effective strategies for handling stressful situations, and addictive people seem to have more than our fair share of them. Be honest: we’ve all been guilty of using a crisis as an excuse to avoid, reject, shut down, lash out, or self-medicate our way through stress at one time or another. It might even be the only way we know how to get through things.
So we rationalize. We tell ourselves it’s just until the crisis has passed, or until the stress subsides. We may even believe that whatever not-helpful thing we feel compelled to do actually is helpful (pro tip: it’s not). The cigarette won’t fix things. It won’t even make you feel 100% better in the moment, because some part of you realizes it’s not a real fix for what’s going on.
Who’s Your Little GUS Buddy?
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