Your warning signs

I want you to picture sustainability as the sides of a circle. Or, like the side of a curve as it goes up and down on a graph, making peaks and valleys across the page. The goal is to straighten the line, making the highs and lows less pronounced. We can do this by learning more about our cues. 

Have you ever thought about how 60 degrees in the springtime feels borderline hot after a brutal winter, but 60 degrees in the fall is described as “crisp,” and people are grabbing sweatshirts? That same temp will tell you that the season is changing on either side of summer and winter. It feels different, but it carries the same information. This is what learning our cues does for us as foster and adoptive caregivers. Coming out of a season of drowning - it brings hope. Feeling it on the downward slope after everything is going well gives me a cue that I need to make some adjustments, or we’re going to be headed into a really hard season.

If we bring awareness to our cues, then we can bring awareness to the state of our mental health. Because that’s what we’re really talking about, right? Circumstances can be really hard, but if our mental health is stable, then it feels manageable.  Cues could be anything. I think most of us would say that the speed of annoyance could be a cue. Or, possibly, sensory overload. Certainly, both of those are cues for me - but they’re not big enough to straighten out the curve. Or, probably even more accurate, they’re symptoms that suggest I’m already underwater. 

I have found, for me, it’s typically something that comes naturally to my personality either being present or missing. 

For instance, one of my warning signs for when I’m out of balance is if I’m not funny and/or if I’m not having fun in the mundane parts of life. In fact, the moment that I can name it, I bring awareness to the current state of my mental health. Why? Because fun comes naturally to me (I can literally make cleaning a toilet fun) and humor is a core value of my life … so if I’m not laughing or making people laugh, I’m off center. 

On the flip side, (and I literally cannot believe I’m going to say this outloud) I know my soul is nourished and I’m rested if I find myself narrating my life in my head as if I’m writing a chapter in a book about my life. It’s a fun little thing I do that romanticizes everyday life, and I never do it when my mental health is suffering. 

Ideally, the more that we know our cues and bring awareness to them, the more we can level the curve. But, even if we can’t level the curve, we can still be grounded and present in the hard…this is what sustainability feels like. Being grounded and present in our lives, not overwhelmed by circumstances, and not reactive to everything that happens around us.