Finding a balance.

I have a very outgoing, loving life personality! I love to hang out with friends, I love to be loud, to play games, and one of my all time favourite things to do is dance! No, I don't do any trained dancing of sorts.... I just let music move me, and it could do that for hours. Needless to say, I'm very outgoing. But, I'm also somewhat of a perfectionist in some areas of my life. I expect a lot from myself, and I'm very hard on myself and thus have a hard time forgiving myself. Because I have this type of personality, I'm really prone to swinging from a really high point in my life, to a really low place quite quickly. I want to give you the most recent example.

1st year of nursing school was a joke for me. I had one class that I needed to apply myself in, and the rest I didn't study or do readings and still got at least 80% easy. 2nd year of nursing school= death. First year made me lazy, and then second year you are thrown into school with 6 classes per semester and only one class was an easy, 'useless' class. To go along with this increased workload at school, I had begun changing my lifestyle and had lost nearly 50 pounds, was exercising every single day and never cheated on my diet. I put a lot of pressure on myself. Because of all this, I pushed myself way too hard and at the end of my 2nd year I was diagnosed with depression. I wanted to do stuff, but had absolutely no motivation to do it. I would get on my treadmill and start crying within a minute, when I would manage to force myself to derby practice (I play roller derby, it's awesome and I love it), I would usually end up crying because the person inside my head had nothing positive to say about me. It was a very hard, very low time in my life. I'm very glad it's over.

Needless to say, recovering from my somewhat recent depression hasn't been easy. In that time I gained about 20 lbs, and I have just started working it off. My parents, who we used to see at least 1-2 times a week have moved to Uganda and I have found out I won't be able to have kids the way that I wanted to. I have always feared that the news of our infertility would send me back into another tailspin, but I'm really doing well (especially since beginning my blog, although some days or weeks are horrible). Justin has been amazing, along with our friends and family. We have really been shown a lot of love through this time. But at the same time, I have had to make choices that I wish I didn't have to, but I think were necessary for me to not slip back into depression. In the fall I had committed to being on our roller derby league's board, which I was very excited about. I absolutely love playing derby, and had to make a really tough choice to completely step back from it. My heart is so sad about this, and I often try to convince myself I could do it, but I know it would be too much. I'm now also working full time shift work - 12 hour shifts. I often tell my husband that I must walk at least a marathon everyday, it's very busy, and extremely exhausting. I'm extremely thankful for the people in my life that remind me that I have a lot going on. The stress of dealing with the infertility alone can completely take me out of commission some days, so to be committed to work, derby, losing weight, training for a half marathon, being a wife and trying to organize an international adoption.... that's a little much.

Although I know that I'm trying to find a balance, I really don't know how to do this. I'm an all or nothing person- literally. I feel like I should be able to do everything and anything, but if it's anything less than that, it's not worth doing at all. And when I let other people down, I let myself down more and I am so incredibly hard on myself. How do I convince myself that the choices I have made - to give up things that I love- are for the best? And some days I really think I could do it all.... and today is one of those days. I need to find a balance, and maybe this is what balance is....

For the first time in my life I feel like I'm actually taking steps to take care of myself- to protect myself from some potential burnout. So why doesn't it feel like it? I feel like I'm missing out on fun derby times, I hate missing out on stuff. I want to be where the action is. I just don't know.

I could use prayers to reassure the decisions I've made. I know they are for the best, but somedays they don't feel that way.

Thanks for reading! Please consider coming to our fundraising banquet on April 27th! If you would like to donate something for our silent auction, we would also love that!

We love you guys so much, thanks for walking through this time with us.