My sister-in-law and I painted almost nonstop for I don’t even know…three weeks?

[My sense of time is still kind of wacky. I feel like I dropped a few weeks into a paint can and I’m stuck trying to fish them out…]

Realize every room needed two coats of paint. There are fourteen rooms in the house.

Having developed some proficiency somehow for cutting (the fancy-pants painter word for carefully painting a line along an edge), I ended up doing almost all of the cutting in the entire house.

The exceptions are a stretch my trooper sis-in-law tried while I was resting (she decided she much preferred rolling), a room-coat and a half that I begged a friend to come and help with because my shoulder and wrist were bothering me, and I think four room-coats Matt helped with on Saturdays. (The stairwell, for two of those.)

And then my sister-in-law started homeschool with her own kids, and I was on my own again…with a new, challenging schedule from starting school…in limbo between two houses…surrounded by chaos…with a heavy load of projects in process around me…Matt working 55+ hours a week…

I started dreading getting out of bed. This summer was amazing—for the first time in my adult life, I consistently didn’t find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Now I was right back to waking up and hating my life and the day ahead of me.

When I would tell people about progress on the house, they would say, “that’s so exciting!”…but my own internal response was numb and dead.

I felt completely overwhelmed. I would resolve to make some progress on things, tackle some project and complete something, but walk into our project house and instantly start shutting down. I would try to settle on one thing to work on and end up chasing my own thoughts in circles until my head hurt…and do absolutely nothing. I was overwhelmed to the point of disability.

I started finding myself unable to respond to the kids in ways that I normally could.

Driving through town one day, I was struck by the sudden urge to drive endlessly into the horizon.

Oh. I’ve been here before. This is familiar. This is depression.

I entered my bedroom after picking up the kids one afternoon and started crying. I couldn’t stop. For hours.

The crying episode repeated a couple days later.

I felt sad. I felt lonely.

[Well, to be honest, I still kind of do. I see my best friend for all of thirty seconds at five am in the morning and, if we’re lucky, maybe a couple of kid-care-and-conflict-filled hours in the evening before dropping into bed exhausted.

Moments for just us seem stolen and also just totally insufficient.

Matt isolated that we both really want to work on these house projects together, just us, and a lot of the sadness comes from the fact that life just isn’t there right now.]

So the week before last, I did almost nothing tangible on the house. I wasn’t there emotionally. With divine timing, my therapist came back from her extended maternity leave and our first session was right back in the trenches.

Matt encouraged me to drop external expectations I was holding (what do other people want or expect me to do?) and focus on what would make the most sense for me personally. What would I get the most satisfaction out of? What would help me to start building organization at the “new” house? What would I get the biggest return from?

It was a big reframe for me, and a much-needed one. After getting into a painting zone, burning out on it, and feeling guilty because I was still in that zone but I didn’t even want to do minor painting anymore, Matt and my therapist both expressly told me to give myself permission to pursue what I needed.

So I wrote it down.

• I was majorly aggravated every time I couldn’t find a pen.
• There were key areas of disgusting grossness that made me want to crawl out of my skin–the front door and the toilet especially.
• I felt very frustrated by the lack of running water in the house and the concomitant lack of hygiene, making me feel yucky.
• I hated the sense of chaos all around me with no ability to organize it. This was exacerbated by being split between two houses.
• I hated the sense of no direction with projects (rather, too many directions) and the inability to focus because of it.

Then—

I took my daughter to the local thrift shop.

I walked the dogs a little more leisurely than normal.

I brought a set of sheets and made up the mattress (originally bought for my daughter when she was recovering from strep and flu B at the same time, but now I use it to rest) like a decent bed and it felt so much more human.

I shopped at Menards for a new toilet seat.

I sorted through my ginormous backlog of unsorted papers and took care of some financial busywork.

I thought about what I want the finished house to feel like and started a wish list.

I found a cup for my pens.

When he was available, Matt walked me through the process for creating some closet organization in my office and set me up to work on it this week, breaking down as many obstacles to getting started on the project as he could.

Matt reminded me that the tub had running water. (Oh. Yeah. Duh!) I took the plastic left over from painting off the tub, and bought some nice hand soap and a clean new hand towel for washing hands.

I had two kids scrub the front door, and they were rewarded with ice cream bars. I still don’t like the door itself, but it feels so much better.

I even painted…my shelf boards. I haven’t touched a window frame (next painting step) in two weeks, other than to let in the cool breezes in the morning.

This is real life. Progress always comes at a cost, but sometimes that cost is much higher than usual.

Sometimes pretty pictures hide a messy reality.

Sometimes it’s okay to detour a little bit to give yourself time to recover.

Sometimes it’s okay to slow down and reframe your life.

Those closet shelves are going to be nice.