“You can’t control what’s happening to you or around you, but you can control your reaction and response”.
People often ask me why I’m always calm. Why nothing stresses me and why I can tackle anything thrown at me. My reasoning is simplistic: it’s a mix of Wooler genes, life experience and self-development. I’m also fiercely independent and always have been, just ask my parents. This plays a key role when you consider reactive responses to situations and scenarios, which can become emotionally uncontrollable – a state I am rarely in.
A loss of control is guaranteed to happen in life, but a person’s power lies in their ability to manage their own response and reaction to the events surrounding them.
As a practical person and quite in tune with myself, I can apply emotional intelligence and reasoning to the most heightened scenarios. Some may be gifted with this skill, others may have some talents and need to develop the rest, and others may have to craft it all. This takes a lot of deliberate focus and attention.
Whatever the case for each individual, it’s never a waste of focus and commitment when it comes to self-development. Forward think six months, and you can either have six months of the same or six months of progress; it’s your choice.
– Mental health trigger warning –
Right now, I am playing a critical support role to a family member suffering from an acute manic mental health episode. A lifelong condition that has exploded to a state that neither of us has ever experienced before.
Blessed with good mental health, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like when a person battles an invisible illness in their mind. All the tools, strategies and resources in the world can’t prepare you for an episode of irrational mania and your focus and attention shift to keeping a person safe for an acute period of time.
My control lies in advocation, strength and a fierce determination not to let the system swallow another person whole.
A tangible example of what this looks like is seeking medical help, keeping notes, advocation to medical professionals, escalating complaints through the correct channels, activating Ryan’s Rule in the hospital system and through all of this, maintaining a level head and an unemotive response to enable rational conversations with professionals. Plus, an awareness of what it takes to reasonably navigate a broken and under-resourced system.
Navigating a significant health event is a lot to take on in parallel to life and can be tiring. Of course, it is nothing compared to what the patient is going through. Still, it’s worth mentioning because the relentless demands can be a lot, especially when making decisions for two people instead of one, yourself and the patient who isn’t capable.
Self-awareness and self-care play a crucial role in ensuring the sustainability of a person in a carer role as they navigate this landscape of life. Head-in-the-sand approaches are not my cup of tea, and decisions and control are where it’s at.
After navigating full-time work, running a business, caring for a family member from 24 March 2023, and actively participating in the family and community activities that fill my cup and aid my general happiness, it was within my control to make the call to take some time off. Some people may slink off and recoup privately, but I’m starting to love and embrace openly sharing, especially the topics that make people uncomfortable. Not because I want to cause discomfort but because I feel it’s important to normalise these topics and have these conversations.
Sometimes you just need to release one thing to relieve the world’s grip on you so that you can breathe again.
In saying this, I’ve taken this week off from my paid job, but shhh, don’t tell anyone. I’m kidding, of course, about not telling anyone, but it’s a running joke in my family that when I take a day off, we don’t tell anyone; otherwise, I jinx myself and find something to occupy myself with.
I can’t control what’s happening to me or around me, but I can control my response to it, and I can listen to myself and hear what I need. And if I want to maintain control, I must listen before my body forces the message to be heard.
Here’s to a reset week. After all, peak performers work hard, play hard and rest hard.
