Productivity

Being busy is different from being productive. The difference in definition is often in the eye of the beholder. I've always been one of those people running around always feeling like I'm got something to do. This in layman's term translates into being "uptight". I've been called uptight several times even in the last few days and I sadly must admit it is true. This takes so much away from the good I could do. Productivity is not necessarily being busy but producing something useful or more importantly something beautiful. In my mind something useful (in all the good ways) is something beautiful. I'm trying to stop and examine my motives and outcomes in a less frantic and more intuitive way. I am only one person and I can stay busy my whole life, ruin myself, and fail to have any meaningful product or I can stop, breath, and do what I can. I am in fact no superhero.

I'm writing this after two days of feeling like a superhero. I managed to do most of my monthly documentation, have 2 of my most poorly documented cases reviewed for errors, sleep 5 hours nightly, find a new apartment, catch up with loved ones, find a child the RIGHT placement, and I even took a little time to cook. This time had substance and produced what I'd like to think were good products, and I even managed to minimize my "fazzledness". I realize of course that every day cannot be like this or I will most likely die at age 25 of heart failure or in a car wreck driving fanatically somewhere (maybe I'll die this way anyways :)... many of my loved ones have expressed this fear). I must stop and realize I am only one person and that just as I am here for others to lean on, there are others that are willing to lend me a shoulder when necessary.

The exhaustion of this kind of life (the kind of life I've been blindly leading for the last 5, 6, maybe even 7 years) has finally began to really surface. I realize that behind all this hustle there is beauty, but there is also empty busy work that I've done out of fear, or tasks that I've put more energy than they deserved into because I feared failure or had the wrong motivations or refused to say no.

Each moment is becoming more precious and as it does, each moment becomes more beautiful and less urgent. Even if I feel a child's life is in my hands, I must relax and use my calm to help calm their fears. Urgency is often present in my work, but the urgency is only in the fear. If I use love and the brain that I have recently neglected because of emotional overwhelm, I will survive and not only will I survive but I will quite possibly do what I am trying to do as a social worker, help others in their survival.

This lesson can easily be learned from the teenagers I work with. They learn to survive and they have given up on the urgency. I see how this urgency has sometimes turned into fear, manipulation, and lack of trust. This urgency that sprung from feelings of inadequacy, feelings of abandonment, feelings of no one ever listening to them, and also feelings that most normal teenagers will experience reguardless. These children, almost adults, have given up on the urgency because often the adults only see the urgency and fail to see the child, the child hidden behind the almost adult face and the adult like coping skills of manipulation and negative coping. If I am to ever be productive or happy in my job (or even life), I have to forget the urgency and even forget the sadness of these souls' pasts and just focus on what I am able to do and need to do to show them that I will look past their masks of negative coping and take the time to see them.

I hope this doesn't sound self righteous. I only mean that this is what I must do, this is what we all must do in dealing with each others more unpleasant sides (including our own inner (or external) darker selves). I don't by any means feel I've mastered this. I'm just trying my best, and that is all I can do.