I've been overwhelmed lately with emotions. Part of it is from medication I'm taking (mood swings and ultra-sensitivity have made for some pretty ugly days around this house.) It's become abundantly apparent to me that I have difficulty controlling my emotions. No one seems to have a good answer for this. Everything I've read and heard just comes down to one solution: Do what's right and don't worry about how you feel.I can see the wisdom of that. Mostly, that's what I aim for. I don't feel like getting up at 2 am and patting the baby back down to sleep, but I do it. I feel like giving all our money away to an orphanage in Uganda, but I count pennies at the grocery store instead. I'm pretty adept at doing what I need to do. Sometimes kindly. Sometimes not. Yet I am still a roiling sea of resentment, frustration, impatience, intolerance and misery.
The other advice I often hear is to Give it to Jesus. Umm, apparently, Jesus doesn't want it? Because somehow I still have all the pain. He must have given it back or something. Who knew the Christ was a re-gifter?
Anyway, being as there doesn't seem to be a way to change my emotional reaction, I think a bit of a switch is in order. It is time to stop whining about how difficult it is to be Woe-Is-Me and focus instead on the ones this blog was designed to focus on. The poor. When I first started, I intended to post maybe 25% of the time about my personal efforts to Take the Poor With Me. The rest was supposed to showcase the lives of the poor, highlight NGOs doing good around the world, share prayers and novenas and Saints who focus on the poor, maybe with a dash of politics every now and then.
Thus I intend to start focusing on some of those other things. Look for more regular and useful posts in the near future!
Picture Credit.
3 comments:
this is a post that speaks right to the heart of a human! (it **is** a useful post!!!) my prayer partner & i had this very discussion several years ago when both of us were in similar states of emotional turmoil & the answer we kept getting in prayer was "do your duty until you get a new direction from God; do your duty even when you don't feel like it/feel it"...it was hard very often because i felt like a fraud when i was praying the Liturgy of the Hours & yet harbored all these unholy thoughts in my heart & my feeble mind continuously wandered away from the words on the pages.
one thing i have also found quite helpful through the years is forcing (& it really is that sometimes) myself to do intercessory prayer for the many who have asked when i find myself wallowing in self-pity. it is hard to pity myself when i consider the lot of those who have asked for my prayers against the backdrop of my extremely blessed life. the hardest part of that is switching the gears from the me-me-me-oh-woe-is-me thought to the genuine prayer for another. but once it happens it is a blessing.
God bless...
Great post -- thanks for your honesty. I look forward to reading more!
I assume since you are on meds, that you have had your Vitamin D levels checked? Very important. Do so ASAP if you haven't. It is a blood test and while they are at it, check the rest of your mineral and vitamin levels. Very informative.
The emotional roller coaster can be due to biological causes.
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